


Peter Parker and the Palladium Problem

by thesemovingparts



Series: Supercut [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, College Student Peter Parker, Comic Book Science, F/M, Gen, Genius Peter Parker, Intern Peter Parker, Iron Man 2 Reimagined, Irondad, Peter Parker is a Little Shit, Tony Stark is struggling, and they're not gonna apologize for it, and this is part one of a series, canon nudged to the left, no one asked for this except my brain, petermj is a slowburn, so they'll... get there eventually, the FOS squad are all Little Shits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28779522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesemovingparts/pseuds/thesemovingparts
Summary: “Now. Question of the rhetorical variety,” Tony swiped up a new holoscreen between the two of them, featuring strings of code that Tony had most certainly not written. “This was you, right?”Peter, hands stuffed in his pockets, seemed to face a moment of acceptance then, rather than the panic that Tony had been expecting. Although, a kid gutsy enough to have done what he did, to still be surviving after having lost as much as he had, maybe he was actually better under pressure than anywhere else.“A denial would be offensive, right?” Peter asked simply. “To your intelligence and stuff?”*OR: It’s Iron Man 2, except Peter Parker is the 19-year-old SI intern that doesn’t know how to mind his own business.
Relationships: Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, pre-Michelle Jones/ Peter Parker
Series: Supercut [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2110125
Comments: 315
Kudos: 1002
Collections: All Your (and My) Capable Smart BAMF Peter Parker Needs, Collection of stories in which no one knows that Peter is Spiderman





	1. Peter Parker Makes a Plan

**Author's Note:**

> I've written a great deal of heavy angst and h/c in recent months, so I decided I was going to do something completely not that and many more words than I expected later, here we are! 
> 
> Full disclosure, this universe is something I'm writing purely for the fun of it and I'm not going in as hard with the language of it or the proofreading or anything so if at any point you're like "prem this is nonsense" yes! yes it is thank you! 
> 
> Theoretically, this will be part of a larger series that takes us through the MCU with this as our starting point, just like, in case you were wondering what that's all about. 
> 
> anyway, welcome to Prem Tries New Things Even If She's Not Immediately Perfect at them-- hope you enjoy!

“Wait-- no, dude you gotta-- are you seriously gonna make me do all the work here?”

“I’m telling you-- there’s no HDMI port on this fucking television, Ned,” Peter explained, head craned behind the boxy set that they’d found on the sidewalk outside of someone’s building and bullied into working again. Mostly working. 

“It’s, like, about to start,” Ned groused. “Just-- Ugh, we’ll just watch it on my laptop then. Get over here.” 

Peter gave up on his current task and nimbly vaulted the coffee table between them to plop down on the couch beside Ned. 

“Have you got all the feeds up?” Peter asked as he peeked over Ned’s shoulder where the screen did, in fact, display about a half a dozen different camera angles of a massive, lit-up stage, just as the music started up and the crowd began to cheer. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it,” Ned repositioned the laptop so it was balanced between their laps, one thigh each. “He’s supposed to be there for this, right?”

“I heard he was introducing the whole thing,” Peter shrugged. “Oh-- Jesus, this is something else, isn’t it?”

He grimaced as twenty dancers dressed in skimpy Iron Man costumes made their way on stage. 

“Classy,” Ned deadpanned. “Classy is what this is.” 

Peter snorted, but cut himself off as the door to the apartment swung open. Ned had a tendency to forget to lock the door behind him when he came home from class, a tendency of which all of their friends were aware and thus took advantage of when they didn’t feel like taking the time to ask permission to come over. 

One friend in particular. 

“Why do you both look guilty?” Michelle asked, frowning at them from the doorway before dropping her backpack on the floor and making her way across the room. 

“No reason!” Ned exclaimed guiltily as Peter looked back down at the feed in front of them and willed the current performance to change to something a little less… Stark. 

No luck, though, because it was Peter Parker asking, so Michelle made a vaguely disgusted sound at the back of her throat as she leaned over the back of the couch between their shoulders to watch. 

“Are these women giving keynote addresses later?” she asked flatly. 

Peter snorted. “Been a while since they had one of these expos,” he said. “You never know.”

“They’re really good dancers,” Ned shrugged. 

“Yes, they actually are,” Michelle agreed. “But this show is in no way about their talent and totally about-- Oh, there he is! Man of the fucking hour.” 

Sure enough, Iron Man himself was falling from the sky, and as much as Peter genuinely agreed with Michelle’s general disdain for the way the man conducted himself and his business and his all-around brand, he couldn’t help but be a little bit in awe all the same. 

The way that suit disassembled itself, the way it made a man _fly--_ and actually fly, not Peter’s pseudo version of flying that still required super strength if he didn’t want to wrench his shoulder out of socket-- was a work of scientific and engineering _prowess_ that made Peter’s little nerd heart positively sing. 

_“I’m not saying that the world is enjoying its longest uninterrupted peace in years because of me,”_ Tony Stark was saying on stage as Ned turned up the volume on his dinky laptop speakers so they could better hear him. _“I’m not saying that from the ashes of captivity, never has a better phoenix metaphor been personified in human history--”_

“You’ve gotta be kidding me with this guy,” Michelle snorted, pushing up from her perch on the back of the couch and moving towards their kitchen instead. 

Peter turned his head just enough to watch her, one ear listening to Tony loudly wax poetic about himself to a crowd of thousands and one listening to the quiet clinking of mugs against each other, the faucet running, as Michelle took on the familiar task of making post-class tea for herself. 

The only reason they had green tea in their pantry was because of her. 

“Yeah, okay, he really is kind of an ass, huh?” Ned said, pulling back Peter’s attention. 

“What’d he say?” 

Ned shot him a look. 

“What?” Peter grimaced apologetically and Ned rolled his eyes. 

“He’s talking about how no one could come toe-to-toe with Iron Man,” Ned explained. “I mean-- The tech is phenomenal, I’ll give him that-- but he’s still just a guy inside of it, right?”

“Yeah,” Michelle agreed. “One well-timed, well-placed web and Spider-Man could bring that hunk of metal to the ground.” 

“MJ!” Peter balked. 

“I’m not saying you would or that you’d want to,” she leaned in the open doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “I’m just saying you _could.”_

“Yeah,” Ned nodded. “And you’re not throwing a big, ridiculous party for yourself for it either.” 

“Spider-Man and Iron Man do very different jobs,” Peter crossed his arms and leaned back against flat cushions. “And I’m not saying I support everything about him, but it would be crazy fucking hypocritical of me to call him arrogant when anyone who, you know, fights crime has to be arrogant enough to think they’ll actually win.” 

He can tell that both of his friends want to push back against that particular line of reasoning, as they always did when it came to defending Spider-Man, but Peter very pointedly returned his gaze to the feed in front of them and so they graciously followed his lead. 

_“It’s about what we choose to leave behind for future generations,”_ Tony was saying now, a little less gravitas to his posture with his hands behind his back as he addressed the crowd. _“And that’s why for the next year-- and for the first time since 1974-- the best and brightest men and women of nations and corporations the world over will pool their resources, share their collective vision, to leave behind a brighter future!”_

“I’ll give him this,” Michelle said as the electric kettle in the kitchen beeped and she returned to her tea-making. “He knows how to work an audience.” 

“Yeah,” Peter sighed. 

“Hey, don’t you get tickets to this actual thing since you’re an intern?” Michelle asked as she returned with a full mug, perching on the arm of the couch instead of standing behind them this time. 

“Couldn’t use them for opening night because tickets sold out in, like, ninety seconds or something crazy,” Peter responded. “There’s actually-- Um-- There’s gonna be a ton of booths on, like, clean energy and shit the day we’re going and if you wanted-- wanted to join us…”

Ned leveled him with a look that screamed _you’re pathetic, Parker_ while Michelle just appraised him curiously. 

“You got an extra ticket for me?” she asked. 

“Yes!” Peter exclaimed with a level of enthusiasm that made him cringe all the way from the crown of his head to the sticky soles of his feet. “I mean-- I know it’s not super your thing, but it could be-- fun?”

Michelle finished taking a sip of her tea, cocked her head to the side contemplatively, and then said, “Sure,” with a nonchalant shrug. 

Peter had to hold back his grin so it only encroached upon approximately ninety-five percent of his face rather than the full one-hundred and ten that it was aiming for. 

“But if we run into Tony Stark, I _will_ be embarrassing you publicly,” she continued glibly. 

“Sure thing,” Peter laughed as Ned said, “We’re not gonna just _run into_ Tony Stark.”

“Why not?” she goaded him. 

“Peter _works_ at SI and he still hasn’t met him,” Ned explained with exasperation, none of them properly paying attention to the video of Howard Stark now playing on the Expo stage. 

“To be fair,” Peter chimed in. “Interning is a lot like theoretically working at a place. Especially with the way I don’t, you know, get paid a living wage.” 

Michelle pointed at him approvingly, a small smirk playing at the edges of her lips that definitely didn’t make Peter’s stomach swoop. 

“Sing it sister,” she said. 

_“The Stark Expo,”_ Howard said on screen. _“Welcome.”_

***

_Blood Toxicity: 19 percent._

Tony Stark was being poisoned. 

Tony Stark was poisoning _himself._

Tony Stark was poisoning himself with the very thing that was meant to be keeping him alive and goddammit if that wasn’t just the most on-brand thing he had ever managed to do. 

Not the Iron Man suit, not the glitz and glamor of the Expo taking place on the stage he had just stepped away from moments before, but this. Being bitten in the ass by a faith he never should have had in his own ability to maintain control on any situation, let alone his own wellbeing. 

So, at the root of it he was dying. 

Pushing through crowds of people who were enamored by a version of himself that very much _wasn’t_ stuck in the middle of a crisis he couldn’t solve, signing Iron Man posters for kids that didn’t have a fucking clue who it was he actually was, past the semi-heroic nonsense and big, flashy repulsor beams. 

All those people, all that approval-- finally, _finally,_ all that fucking validation-- and still he was dying. 

And that wasn’t even to mention the fact that he’d been--

“Subpoenaed!” 

“Yep,” Happy pulled his seat belt a little bit tighter as Tony whipped the car around a tight bend in the road. 

They were probably only a third of the way into their two-hundred plus mile journey to D.C. but Tony had no intention of _stopping_ his complaints any time soon. 

“I mean,” he continued. “Not that I didn’t see it coming, because I see everything coming--”

“You sure do,” Happy deadpanned. 

Tony shot him a look. “The sass-- The sass while I’m driving? Really not necessary, Hap.” 

Happy just shrugged. “My bad. You were saying?”

“They’re trying to prove, what?” Tony continued, talking with his hands more than anyone behind the wheel real ought to. “That Iron Man should belong to the military?”

“I do believe that’s part of it.”

“Joke’s on them, though,” Tony laughed drily. “Because _I’m_ Iron Man and the military can’t go claiming ownership of people, now can they?”

“I think a certain subsection of person would probably disagree with that, but I see your point,” Happy replied. 

“Disagree with the fact that the military doesn’t own people or the fact that I, myself, am actually human?” 

Happy made a face, Tony accelerated the car. 

“I was _kidding!”_ Happy exclaimed, pushed back even further in his seat and palm pressed tight up against the dashboard. 

“Stop trying to make the nickname less ironic!” Tony shot back. “It doesn’t suit you.” 

***

_Blood Toxicity: 21 percent._

“Mister Stark,” Senator Stern banged his gavel. “Please.”

“Yes, dear?” Tony swiveled around in his seat and offered up his most charming smile. He _had_ been trying to have a conversation with Pepper where she sat back in the third row, but that was apparently not on the agenda for today. 

Instead, he had to sit there and get fucked by the Senate in one of the least pleasant fuckings of his life so far. 

What they wanted to know was this:

Was the Iron Man suit a specialized weapon? _No but also yes, but also more accurately, no._

If so, then why should he be allowed private and sole access to it? _Because, quite frankly, they couldn’t have it._

“If your priority was actually--”

“My priority, Mister Stark,” Stern cut him off which really, in the grand scheme of things, should not have felt like as big of a slight as it did. But he was actively poisoning himself so maybe the shitshow was just being heightened by that. “My priority is to get the Iron Man weapon turned over to the people--”

“Well you can forget it,” Tony shrugged. “I am Iron Man. The suit and I are one.” 

The look on Stern’s face was almost enough to make the look on Pepper’s face worth it. And the look Tony imagined would have been on his father’s face almost made the way the back-and-forth just continued and continued and continued bearable. 

But Justin Hammer was there, so bearability flew out the window. 

Justin Hammer was there and he was invoking the name of Howard Stark and he was holding that little microphone like a knock-off Freddie Mercury and Tony had _poison_ in his _blood--_

“We all know why we’re here,” Justin said. “In the past six months Anthony Stark has built a sword with untold possibilities and yet he insists it’s a shield.”

Tony turned around in his seat to give Pepper a look, hoping she understood that it meant-- _The wordplay on this guy, I mean seriously? What is this, a poetry slam?_

Pepper just motioned for him to turn back around and he complied because sometimes he just-- liked to comply for her. 

***

Peter knew that he was missing the hearing on TV, a hearing which he was not only interested in watching but technically required to by the two-hundred level poli-sci class he was taking that semester, but there had been a group of guys following a woman that clearly wanted nothing to do with them so he had needed to go twenty minutes out of his way as Spider-Man to make sure she made it home safe before he could turn around and swing back to his own apartment. 

Luckily for him, the hearing was already playing when he crawled in through his window to find, not his actual roommate, but Michelle Jones sitting on his couch with her feet propped up. 

“Hey?” he questioned as he closed the window behind him and pulled off his mask. 

“Ned let me in before he left for class,” she said without looking at him. “It’s not creepy.”

“Sure,” he laughed softly. “How’s he doing?” he nodded to where Tony Stark was slouched low in his seat on screen in such a way that would look timid on most people but looked intentionally uninterested on him. 

“I can’t decide which of these guys I like least,” she lifted her feet easily so Peter could sit down beside her and then dropped them back into his lap. “I mean Stark is Stark, but Justin Hammer is…” she stuck out her tongue and made a _bleh_ sound. 

“Well said,” Peter deadpanned. 

“And then Stern,” she groaned, ignoring his snark and ignoring the way he couldn’t help but smile at her. “I just-- The other two at least didn’t go and get themselves elected to public office, you know?” 

“Yeah, valid point,” he placed a hand on her ankle, considering the fact that he needed to take notes on this thing but that meant needing to get up and stop touching her so he could get his notebook. 

Peter stayed put. 

_“The committee would now like to invite Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes to the chamber,”_ Stern said onscreen and both of their heads whipped up to watch. 

“What?” Peter balked. 

“Aren’t they, like, best friends or something?” Michelle asked him. 

“I mean, the Bugle reports that they’re having an affair like every three months,” Peter said. “But yeah.” 

“Jesus,” Michelle heaved out a breath. “That’s kinda rough.” 

***

“Rhodey?” Tony gaped, swinging around in his chair to watch the doors to the chamber open and-- Yep, that was Rhodey alright.

Tony pushed himself up and strode to meet his friend halfway down the aisle, because they couldn’t avoid eyes or cameras, but he could help them avoid microphones for all of seven seconds. 

“Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” he clasped Rhodey’s hand in his, tried not to panic. 

“Look, it’s me, I’m here, move on,” Rhodey was putting on his professional face and as much as Tony loved Rhodey he really, really hated the professional face. 

“Okay, I just--”

“Drop it,” Rhodey said. “Please.”

“Alright, yeah,” Tony surrendered as they made their way back to the front of the room. “Dropping it. Except--”

“Tones--”

“Listen, this is-- I mean,” Tony leaned into Rhodey’s ear, holding him back before they could sit down. “They’re not chasing down what’s-his-face, the, uh-- You know, Cirque du Soleil-- the spider guy.”

“Spider-Man is something of a New York-centric problem,” Rhodey sighed. “You, on the other hand, have gone and made yourself something of an international problem.” 

“But you admit that Spidey’s a problem,” Tony pointed at him with a grin. “So the fact that everyone’s all focused on me as if I’m the only one--”

“Mister Stark.” 

Fucking Stern. 

***

“Okay, well, that feels like-- I dunno-- Manipulation of the American people,” Peter said, waving a hand at where Stern was forcing Colonel Rhodes to read sections of his report out of context. 

“Hey, that’s good,” Michelle nudged his thigh with her foot. “You should put that in your summary.”

“Pen me,” Peter held up his hand, snatching the pen that Michelle tossed up in his general direction out of thin air. 

He had eventually gotten up to grab his notebook, but only because he had let it slip that he needed to be writing stuff down and Michelle had bullied him into it. There hadn’t been any reason to worry though, her feet were back in his lap without him even needing to ask. 

Peter was halfway through scribbling down the word _manipulation_ when Michelle sat up straighter. 

“Wait, wait, wait,” she shoved at his shoulder. 

“What?” Peter looked to her with sudden concern. 

Michelle pointed at the TV set. “Holy-- What’s he doing? Is he-- _hacking--_ Christ this is a shitshow.” 

“Oh my God,” Peter gaped at the videos being shown right alongside her. “Those are Iron Man suits.” 

“Not quite,” Michelle said as they watched one make it two and a half feet into the air before collapsing to the ground in a shower of sparks. “Didn’t Tony Stark build this thing in a cave? Out of-- dirt? I dunno, I’m not a nerd.”

Peter snorted. “Okay, well that’s a conversation for later,” he said with amusement. “But it _is_ kind of surprising that no one’s gotten farther than this.”

Another exploding suit, right there on their television screen. 

“Like,” he continued. “I know Tony Stark’s a genius, but it can’t be that far removed from regular old engineering, can it?” 

Michelle tilted her head at him, studied him for a moment without him even realizing because his mind was somewhere else. Specifically, his mind was wondering just how hard it _would_ be to recreate the Iron Man suit from scratch without any blueprints--

“Are you aware of what you look like when you go all _brain blast?”_ Michelle asked. “Because I feel like I should take a picture if you aren’t.” 

Peter turned his head, made a face at her, and bit down on the inside of his cheek to keep from beaming.

“Why’re you actually watching this?” he asked, tucking one leg underneath himself so he could turn to face her head-on. “Seriously.”

“I can’t just be watching it?”

“Nope,” he smirked. 

“Seriously?” she quirked an eyebrow at him and he just shrugged. “Because hearings like this create precedent, Peter. And in the case of independently operating vigilante justice? That precedent might end up having a pretty significant fucking impact on our lives one day.”

Peter collapsed a little bit in on himself. “ _My_ life,” he tried to assure her. “I would never let them get to you.”

Michelle snorted a laugh of disbelief but Peter bristled with indignation because he meant that, he always meant that. When it came to her, he would do anything. 

“Okay, ignoring the implication that I don’t worry about you,” she said offhandedly. “You do realize I’ve spent the last two years lying through my teeth for you, right?” 

He grimaced and slouched low on the couch and tossed his notebook onto the coffee table-- he’d rewatch all the stuff they’d missed by having their own conversation on YouTube later if he needed to. 

“Regret being my friend yet?” he asked. 

“Only since the day I met you.”

She smiled at him and his heart jumped out the window.

_“I have successfully privatized world peace!”_

Michelle let out a heavy breath accompanied by a roll of the eyes. 

“God, please promise you never let your whole hero schtick go to your head like that,” she motioned vaguely at the television. 

“I think there’s really a super special ingredient that makes him-- y’know, like that,” Peter laughed. 

“Yeah?” she looked at him quizzically.

“Yeah,” Peter nodded. “And I think it requires a guy to be a hell of a lot less broke than I am.” 

***

Peter’s internship in the Stark Industries Research and Development department had begun the summer after his freshman year at Empire State University. 

He had been very good at getting coffee and a little less good at file organization but his supervisor-- a senior at Columbia named Bailey who was tasked to oversee the interns-- had apparently oversaw something in him when he didn’t catch onto the cues that he shouldn’t be correcting his superiors on their math. 

So he had gotten to stay. 

There was less of the fetching coffee these days and more of the hands-on stuff, although still not as much as he would like, but mostly he got used as a human calculator who finished his work fast enough that sometimes he just fucked around with the equipment available to him and pretended like it wasn’t purely recreational. 

On the day after Tony Stark’s hearing in the Senate, Peter didn’t manage to even finish all of his work before he had to stop and start putting all of his ideas down on paper. 

Because how hard _could_ it be to recreate an Iron Man suit? 

Maybe it wouldn’t be as intuitive as Tony’s, because Peter didn’t exactly have access to any sort of Artificial Intelligence, but the basic machinery of it should have been replicable. It was just robotics at the heart of it, and Peter knew plenty about robotics, so he had a dull pencil and wide-ruled notebook paper and a brain that wouldn’t shut up as he raced to outline all of the different prototype potentials he could think of off the top of his head.

Because it was just mechanics! It was just basic engineering when you broke it down to its skeleton and really the hardest part was just the--

Oh. 

“The arc reactor,” he muttered under his breath as he let his forehead fall onto the hard desk before him. “The fucking arc reactor.” 

Because yeah, at the bare bones level the suit was just an exercise in robotics, but the arc reactor was the key, the arc reactor was what powered it, and what everyone had been trying so hard and failing doubly hard to do was use traditional means of power to get the thing moving. 

And all that did was lead to sparks and fire and explosions because no one but Tony Stark really knew how to build a fucking arc reactor. Even Justin Hammer had fucked the thing up ten ways to Tuesday (a video which had been edited a dozen different ways and had been making its way promptly through STEM departments all over the country). 

Peter sat up and looked over the truly nonsensical string of notes that he’d put together-- notes that were useless period because in what world did he need to build an Iron Man suit, but also useless because he didn’t have the thing that powered it. And he wasn’t upset because he wanted to sell his little exercise in knowledge to any world governments or weapons corporations (he did want to keep his testicals and figured MJ wouldn’t allow that if he did such a thing) but because he was just a big, fat nerd. 

Peter Parker was a nerd and he liked to know how things worked and it was going to drive him positively insane now that he had accepted there was something he didn’t know and wouldn’t know and couldn’t know. 

Something kept so under lock and key--

A lightbulb sparked in the back of Peter’s brain. 

“Parker, you almost done with those calculations?!”

“Yes!” he called back over his shoulder. “Yes, sorry, Sir, working on it now!”

He switched out notebooks and contemplated whether or not the quest for knowledge was worth committing a minor felony. 

***

_Blood Toxicity: 24 percent._

Tony Stark was dying. 

It didn’t matter how much of that stuff he drank, he would keep needing more and more and more to counteract the symptoms of the palladium poisoning until it just became wholly impossible for him to keep up. The symptoms would overtake him, the reactor core wouldn’t be able to keep him alive anymore, he’d be dead. 

“It appears that the continued use of the Iron Man suit is accelerating your condition,” Jarvis told him. 

“Figures,” Tony sighed. 

“And another core has been depleted, Sir.” 

“God, they’re running out quick,” Tony murmured to himself as he pulled out the reactor casing and then the palladium core from within, fried and smoking like an overworked toaster instead of the thing meant to be keeping him alive. 

And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been searching for alternatives. Jarvis had run simulations on element after element after element all the way across the periodic table only to find that none of them could replace what they were already using. 

The palladium core. Which was killing him. 

He replaced said core with a fresh one and slid the reactor back into his chest with a twist and a click, but even still he knew it was temporary. Tony knew it was temporary and he also knew that he had to prepare for the fact that it was so painfully, unfairly temporary. 

So prepare he did. 

***

“I’m sorry you want to do _what?”_

“Okay,” Peter held up his hands and looked around the nearly empty subway platform because Ned was being just a touch louder than he needed to be. “It’s not a big deal, don’t make it a big deal.”

“It’s absolutely a big deal,” Ned gaped at him. “Are you kidding me, Peter? You wanna hack into--”

“Shhh!” Peter hushed him with flailing hands and bright red cheeks. 

Ned lowered his voice considerably and leaned right into Peter’s personal space. 

“You want to hack into Tony Stark’s personal server?” he asked with the kind of disbelief that made whatever he was saying sound unconscionable. It wasn’t though, because Peter was conscion-ing it. “That’s not just illegal that’s a-- a-- a fucking idiotic move!” 

“Ned, come on,” Peter whined. “Don’t you wanna know how that thing works? It’s a piece of clean energy tech that’s just-- keeping a human guy alive! What the fuck, dude! We gotta find out-- we _gotta.”_

“Peter,” Ned leveled a very serious look at him. “I’m concerned that you’re losing your mind. Should I call MJ? Do we need reinforcements?” 

“I have crazy ideas all the time,” Peter pointed out indignantly as the train came screeching into their station. “You always go along with my crazy ideas!”

“Yeah, because those crazy ideas usually have something to do with-- with--” Ned flapped his hands around, searching. “Helping people not get killed by the-- mafia and stuff!” 

“That happened once, that’s the only example you can think of?”

_“Peter!”_

“Okay, okay, okay,” Peter wrapped an arm around Ned’s shoulders and led him onto the train where they shared a handrail. “I just-- I don’t know why but I have this itch to figure this thing out, like it’s been driving me crazy all week and I have a feeling it’s important for some reason.” 

“Like, you have a-- _feeling?”_ Ned lifted both hands up next to his head and did little jazz hands, but just as the train started moving so Peter had to grab onto the front of his shirt to keep him from falling over. 

“Maybe?” Peter shrugged as Ned got his footing again. “It’s never felt like this-- and it’s only ever been for things that are an immediate threat-- but it’s also not exactly scientific at all.” 

“Alright,” Ned sighed. “But even if this wasn’t the dumbest thing you’ve ever tried to rope me into, the likelihood that I could actually get you in is-- Peter, it’s such a longshot.”

“You hacked into OsCorp a month ago!” Peter hissed indignantly before switching to a more pleading tone. “This is exactly in your wheelhouse. Come on, guy in the chair.”

Ned made a disgruntled sound at that, frowning at Peter indiscriminately in a way that meant he was about to fold. Peter grinned faux-innocently. 

“I hate it when you use that against me,” Ned said. “Three month moratorium on that phrase after I do this, deal?”

“You’re gonna do it?” Peter cupped Ned’s face in his hands, beaming broadly. 

Ned rolled his eyes. “Gimme the week, but yeah I’ll do your stupid suicide mission.” 

Peter smacked a sloppy kiss to Ned’s forehead before pulling away and in return Ned grimaced and wiped at his face with the sleeve of his shirt. 

“I owe you big time, dude,” Peter said. 

“You always owe me big time.”

***

“Can I ask,” Rhodey began. “What exactly the point of the Expo is?”

Tony looked across the length of his New York penthouse kitchen, which was not as fully stocked as the one in Malibu much to his chagrin, and was about to open his mouth to bite back against _that_ line of questioning when Pepper strode in and cut him off at his knees. 

“It’s his ego gone crazy,” she said, offering a deadpanned look to Tony and then a warmer smile to Rhodey. “Hi, James, good to see you.”

“Pepper,” Rhodey smiled back and pulled her into a brief hug. “Still overworked and underpaid I presume?”

“Underpaid my ass,” Tony groused. 

“Notice how he doesn’t have anything to say about the _overworked_ part,” Pepper said, but with a lilting tone and a smile on her face, so Tony didn’t think she was actually that torn up about it. “What brings you to our neck of the woods, Colonel?” 

Tony took a sip of the chlorophyll concoction in his coffee mug and lifted his eyebrows at the look on Rhodey’s face. It was a familiar look-- the same one that Tony had been struck down by at the end of many a bender. 

It was the look that said _I’m about to be stern but it’s for your own good and only because I care._

“Uh-oh,” Tony leaned back against the kitchen island and crossed his arms. 

“I’m worried,” Rhodey heaved a sigh. 

“About what?” he put on a mocking sort of frown in response. “Tony’ll make it better.”

Rhodey made a face. “Don’t ever talk about yourself in the third person, it’s weird,” he said. “But I am actually _worried,_ Tones, because every weapons manufacturer on the planet is trying to recreate Iron Man and it’s only a matter of time before someone gets lucky and actually does it.”

“Come on,” Tony scoffed. “You saw the same footage that I did. They’re ten plus years away from even touching what I have now and by then I’ll have taken my _original_ version to even greater heights.”

No he wouldn’t, because he would be dead by then, but that wasn’t a conversation for today. 

“This is different from your old competitors trying to outdo you, though,” Rhodey pressed. 

Pepper nodded. “He’s right,” she said. “I’ve heard noise coming out of Hammer Industries-- this is weirdly personal for him and I don’t love having that hanging over our heads on top of everything else.”

“Guys, Justin Hammer has had a personal vendetta against me since the Clinton administration,” Tony brushed them off. “This isn’t a new threat on the horizon. It’s Justin Hammer for fuck’s sake!” 

“I think,” Rhodey said in that voice he used when he was trying to be diplomatic. “What Pepper and I are trying to say is that it’s something to keep an eye on. Right?”

“Right,” Pepper agreed with a nod. “Right, Tony?” 

Tony rolled his eyes and waved a hand around in some attempt at brushing them off. 

“Right, yeah, on it.” 

What they didn’t know was that he always had his eyes out for threats. He was always looking up, waiting for the next big thing that was going to blow his life up from the inside out, the thing that was going to threaten to hurt his people-- his little pocket of loved ones who were in harm's way just by being loved by him. 

Tony Stark was always vigilant, and now more than ever that he had to take into consideration how to take care of these people-- these good people, better than he deserved-- because the thing in his chest was going to take him down.

It was only a matter of time. 


	2. Peter Parker Gets a Promotion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the response for the first chapter was so far beyond what I expected for this little thing! thank you all so much for your kind words and kudos-- I feel a little like I gotta up my game for you now, but we're gonna keep leaning into the dumb tbh 
> 
> hope you enjoy!

Peter waited until the rest of the interns were on their lunch break before finding an empty computer lab, locking himself inside, and pulling out the thumb drive that Ned had given him with a plea of _please don’t be stupid._

Supposedly, the drive would do most of the work for him, breaking down the barriers he needed in order to find his way onto the wireless private server that Tony used for his own work. 

It was a bad idea, and Peter was aware of this, but just because he was smart didn’t mean he wasn’t also a little bit reckless. 

The NYPD had been trying to get their hands on Spider-Man for years-- literally since the first time that Peter put on his earliest suit prototype and went out for a quick swing around Queens. They hadn’t so much as gotten close in the time since, but looking at what he was doing now, there was the passing thought that they might just be able to get their hands on _Peter Parker,_ and the only satisfaction to be had from _that_ would be that they wouldn’t know they actually had their enemy number one, local vigilante and menace, in custody. 

But Peter had a _feeling_ and he couldn’t explain it to anyone, least of all himself, so there he was, knee deep in Ned’s code and the security protocols it was keeping at bay like the fucking Hoover Dam while he snuck around behind firewalls and prototype files and acronyms-- seriously, a crazy amount of acronyms. 

It took him a full forty-five minutes, and he was just about to call it a day, try again later, because the longer he was in the system the more likely it was that he was about to get caught, but then it happened. 

The file name was a string of incomprehensible letters and numbers and it was tucked in a deep dark corner of the server that Peter was pretty sure he had only been able to find because he was actively searching for a deep dark corner, but he opened it and--

Yeah, those were the specs for Tony Stark’s arc reactor all right. 

At that point, Peter essentially blacked out, absorbing insane amounts of information as fast as he could manage and becoming more and more impressed all the while. 

That could have been expected though-- because it was Tony Stark and Peter was largely impressed with all of his technological advancements, even the ones he didn’t support on a personal level-- but what he hadn’t expected was the sudden flood of concern. 

Because something wasn’t right, and the feeling that was buzzing at the back of his neck was only getting louder and more insistent and then all at once it was screaming because--

Palladium? The guy was using a palladium core? 

_That-- that-- that had to be--_ Peter’s head spun as he considered the makeup of that particular element and the various consequences there might be to inserting it directly into a human being’s chest cavity and, well, he couldn’t quite find a way to make it harmless. 

But Tony Stark was smarter than him, right? If this was what he was using then he must have found a way to avoid literally poisoning himself? 

What Peter needed were answers, and he wasn’t going to be able to get those without talking to the man himself unless…

He dropped his face into his hands and audibly groaned as he realized what he was going to need to do. 

Because really, how much worse was one more breach of security going to be for him if he got caught, right?

***

Pepper Potts knew how to keep a schedule. 

She had dozens of responsibilities to take care of with each passing day, and it would have driven anyone mad, but Pepper Potts had a system and she knew how to commit a schedule to memory and it kept even the most chaotic days of life at Stark Industries manageable. 

That, and the fact that she cleared time every day to eat lunch alone in her office without being disturbed. 

So she kept a schedule, and everyone in the building _knew_ she kept a schedule, and everyone in the building _respected_ that schedule (save her boss who had never properly respected the sanctity of anything), and if that was all true then why was there a lanky, scuffed-up boy sitting in the chair outside her office?

Pepper stepped out of the elevator, tapping on her tablet as she walked, and when she looked up there he was-- just sitting there with his beat-up backpack clutched to his chest and a restless leg bouncing frantically. 

“Can I help you?” she asked, approaching cautiously with one finger hovering over the panic button on her tablet, because he may not have looked like much of a threat but no one was supposed to be waiting for her on her lunch hour and she knew better than most that appearances could be deceiving. 

The boy shot up to his feet the moment she spoke, wild sort of look in his eyes as he swung his backpack over one shoulder. 

“Miss Potts!” he exclaimed, still practically vibrating with restless energy. “I-- um-- I have a meeting with you?”

“Do you?” she lifted an eyebrow and took a few steps closer to him. She had half a mind to lock herself in her office, but she had to walk past him if she was going to do that. 

“Yes,” he nodded hurriedly. “I’m-- I work downstairs. Peter Parker?” he grabbed his lanyard and pulled it all the way off around his neck, holding it out at arms length so she could see that he did in fact work in the building. 

“I’m sorry,” she shook her head sympathetically. “I think you’ve misunderstood. I don’t have any meetings scheduled right now.”

“It should be on your schedule,” he pressed, insistent. “I only-- It’s sort of a last minute meeting but it’s important, I swear. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.” 

Pepper furrowed her brow at him, at the way he seemed earnestly apologetic but emphatic all the same, and decided to at the very least humor the kid. She tapped at her tablet, navigating to her schedule--

“I have a very busy schedule, so maybe you tried to get a meeting with me but just had a bit of a misunderstanding with-- What on Earth?” 

Right there-- situated in the twelve o’clock time slot that was perpetually empty, that everyone knew was meant to be kept perpetually empty, was a single name.

_Peter Parker._

“Did you find it?” Peter asked, wringing his hands in front of him while Pepper gaped-- down at the screen in her hands and then up at him and back again. 

“I-- I don’t-- How?” she balked, more to herself than to him, but he took a small, hesitant step forward nonetheless. 

“Ma’am, I really don’t mean to bother you,” he said. “It’s only-- This is really important. Like, so fu- _reaking_ important--”

“Where exactly in the building do you work?”

“Uh-- R&D,” he said. “I’m an-- uh, intern.” 

“I’ve never met with an intern before,” she said under her breath. 

“It’s about Mister Stark, Ma’am,” he was getting more desperate with each passing moment and she could see the way he was grasping for her attention. “I know I sound insane but it’s about Mister Stark and it’s very, _very_ important that we talk about it.”

Part of her wanted to send him away and forget all about this, a big part of her in fact. 

But Pepper recognized something about that look on his face, because Pepper was a woman who had been working in corporate America for over a decade and she knew-- she _knew_ what it was like to be underestimated and disbelieved and distrusted. 

She knew what it was like to be so desperate for one person to just hear you out and _that_ was the look on this kid’s face. 

Pepper sighed. 

“Yeah, alright,” she stepped past him and opened the door to her office, holding it for him and motioning for him to enter. “Might as well, huh?”

Peter Parker beamed at her. He stepped inside her office. 

***

_Blood Toxicity: 29 percent._

“Okay, Jay,” Tony said, pacing the length of his empty lab. “There’s something we’re missing-- When we can’t find the solution it’s always because we just missed something, yeah? So what is it? What’s that special sauce that’s gonna make this all go away?”

“We seem to have exhausted all modern options, Sir,” Jarvis replied. “Perhaps we should explore future discoveries as well.”

Tony barked out a laugh. 

“You’re funny! Who made you so funny, where’d you get that from?” Tony flicked past a hologram of the arc reactor, effectively minimizing it. “Oh, right. Me.” 

He was very much not doing anything in his actual job description at the moment, but what with all the trying to save his own life on top of preparing for the inevitable failure of such an endeavor, he was pretty booked up. 

Which was why it was both surprising and completely unsurprising when the glass door to the lab slid open. 

“I had an intern in my office today,” Pepper said, striding into the room without so much as a hello. 

“A what?” Tony asked distractedly. It didn’t much sound like a conversation that was relevant to him and he was already so tuned in to the one task at hand--

“An intern. One of your interns,” Pepper said bluntly. “Which was weird because neither me nor my office manager could remember scheduling his appointment and yet-- there it was on my highly secure digital schedule.”

“Are you accusing me of something?” Tony finally set down his work to look at her. “It feels like you’re accusing me of something. Which is fine, but, I would like to know what it is before I fully commit to this conversation, you know?” 

_“Tony.”_

“Pepper, honestly, I didn’t even know I _had_ interns,” he responded to the look she shot him with that sarcastic sort of honesty he achieved so well. 

“R&D has interns,” Pepper said flatly. “Which you would know if you read anything I gave you.”

“Illiterate, unfortunately,” Tony said glibly, fiddling with the hologram in front of him. “Really, a tragedy of our education system.”

“This kid though,” Pepper ignored his tangent, because that was what they did and that was why they worked. “It was weird and I’m-- I don’t know, the whole thing made my skin crawl.” 

“Fire him,” Tony shrugged. “I’ve always said we hold our interns to a very high standard. Well. I’m saying it now that I know we have interns.” 

“He kept going on about how you were in danger,” Pepper leaned her hip against the workbench beside where he was sitting. “As if there was something still wrong with your heart, like-- he kept saying something about you being _poisoned?_ I don’t know, it felt like a weird backwards threat.”

Tony’s head snapped up to look at her, suddenly taking this conversation a lot more seriously than he had been because-- well, because now _his_ skin was crawling. 

“He mentioned poison?” he asked, trying to remain neutral, but failing if the way Pepper’s eyes were studying him were any indicator. “What-- What exactly…?”

“Um… I’m not-- It started with a _p_ I think? Like, Pal-- Pallind--”

“Palladium poisoning?” Tony asked abruptly. 

“Yeah…” her quizzical eyes turned worried. “Tony is this something I need to be made aware of? Is this something _Happy_ needs to be made aware of?” 

“What was the kid’s name?” Tony stood up and moved to a nearby monitor. 

“Let me…” Pepper tapped away at her tablet a few times. “Parker. Peter Parker. Tony, what’s going--”

“Jay, pull up everything you can find on one Peter Parker, please.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Tony, tell me I don’t need to be worried about this,” Pepper said more sternly, following him across the room as the screens before them lit up with Peter Parker’s employment file (Stark Industries, R&D), birth certificate (19 years old), current address (Forest Hills, Queens)--

“You don’t need to be worried,” Tony said simply. “Do you remember anything else that this kid said to you?”

Pepper huffed in frustration at Tony’s ongoing obstinance. “I don’t know, Tony. He was talking like he wanted to help but he was so out of place it felt… off.” 

He looked at her then, took in the tension on her face and across her shoulders, and was suddenly guilty for having helped put it there. It was always him that put it there, but he could handle a teenager who knew a little too much on his own, and he could take this worry off of Pepper’s plate. 

“Hey, okay, you’re all worried about me, which is so very sweet,” he lifted his hands in what he hoped was calm acquiescence. “But I’m not scared of this kid, I’m just curious. He’s throwing around concepts way beyond what an intern should be up to date on, and I honestly kinda want to meet him.” 

“You want to… meet an intern?” Pepper asked suspiciously. “And I shouldn’t be worried?” 

“Why would you ever need to be worried about me?” Tony asked, striding across the room and forcing her to chase after him. 

“Tony, there are only about eight-thousand and-- and eleven things I need to talk to you about _before_ you go off on some tangent with an intern--”

“He’s a weird intern-- Special! You said so yourself,” Tony threw his hands up in the air as he came to a stop in front of another hologram.

“Your company is going to fall into disarray,” Pepper continued insistently. “I need you to make some decisions here and, okay, it’s on me for bringing this thing to your attention at all. I should have known you would fixate, but all I am asking--”

“I don’t care about the board and the decisions and the agendas!” Tony said with his hands as much as his mouth. 

“It’s kind of important that you care. I need you to care,” Pepper said. “I mean, I care! I care about this stuff.”

“Okay,” Tony turned, looked her right in the eye. “You do it.” 

Pepper cocked her head to the side and frowned at him. Her ponytail swung in a way that made his almost-a-functioning-heart swoop uncomfortably and he ignored it. 

“I’m trying to do it,” she told him. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

“No,” Tony shook his head, put-upon nonchalance in full effect as to create the illusion that this was spur of the moment and not something he had been considering for months. “You _do_ it. You run the company.” 

“I run the--?” she furrowed her brow. “What are you talking about?” 

“I’m asking you to run the company--”

“I’m _trying to_ run your company--”

“This isn’t-- Pepper, you’re not listening to me--”

“I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult about--”

“I’m making you CEO!” Tony raised his voice just enough to be heard over her raised voice. “I’m trying to make you CEO. Are you gonna let me?”

Pepper froze. “Are you drunk?”

“Just on life,” Tony said glibly. “And interesting mysteries about nineteen-year-old interns.” 

“Okay, well don’t say that to anyone else,” she deadpanned. “You sound like a predator.” 

“Pepper Potts,” he took a step towards her and put his hands on her shoulders, injecting all his unused sincerity into this one sentence. “I hereby irrevocably appoint you chairman and CEO of Stark Industries. Effective immediately.” 

Her eyes were so big-- those eyes that knew him, really truly knew him for all that he was and still refused to look away-- and her exhale carried an awe with it that Tony understood just by being in the same room as her. 

He had to clap his hands together, tag on a quick, “Yep, done deal,” so he could step away and stop looking at her looking at him in that way. It was bad for his not-quite-a-heart and it was bad for his ego.

It made him think for a second that he was worthy of her looking like that, which was certainly untrue, so he grabbed a bottle of champagne while her eyes continued to follow him and he handed her a glass and he smiled when a bubble of a disbelieving laugh finally made its way out from between her lips. 

“You’re serious about this?” she asked softly, deftly holding the glass without drinking from it. 

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Tony shrugged. “Looked at my options, figured out the legal bullshit to make sure I was allowed to appoint my own successor, and-- it’s you. It’s always been you.” 

There were tears in her eyes and he thought they were the good kind, really hoped they were the good kind when he said, “Congratulations, then?” 

Pepper laughed and chased down his glass to clink it against her own. 

“Yeah,” she smiled. “I guess so.” 

On the other side of the room, a full file on everything ever accomplished by one Peter Parker blinked to life. 

***

“You’re going to get arrested.”

“No, I’m not!” Peter blustered, sitting on the surface of one of the bigger tables in this part of the library while Michelle worked on shelving a stack of books from her cart. “MJ, many police have tried and still they continue to fail.”

“I’m not talking about _that guy_ getting arrested,” she shot him a look. “I’m talking about Peter Parker getting arrested. It’s, like, sort of inevitable at this point.”

Peter frowned. “How so?”

A huff of nearly-amused breath through her nose and Michelle dropped the book currently in her hands back onto the cart so she could face him fully. 

“You talked to Pepper Potts today?” she questioned. 

“Yes.”

“About how you think Tony Stark is being poisoned by his arc reactor?”

“Yeah,” Peter shrugged. 

“Which is a theory you’ve come up with based on information that you got by hacking into very heavily guarded private servers-- y’know, a crime?” 

Peter floundered, talking with his hands as he hissed, “I didn’t tell Pepper Potts that I _did a crime,_ Michelle!”

“You know what? You’re right,” Michelle deadpanned in a way that told Peter she did not, in fact, think he was right. “I doubt you’ll go to prison.”

“Because?” he lifted an eyebrow at her. 

“Big corporation like that has the money to just…” she lifted a hand in the shape of the gun and mimed shooting him in the head with a click of her tongue. 

Peter breathed a heavy sigh, hands in his lap and shoulders slumped. 

“Cool,” he said flatly. “If I get politically assassinated will you tell May it was for more impressive reasons than dumb curiosity?” 

“Sure thing,” she turned back to reshelving books and Peter laid down flat on the table. 

“Thanks.” 

***

A woman named Natalie helped Tony hand over his company to his trusted companion and light of his life, Pepper Potts and then promptly took Happy straight to the mat. 

He hired her on the spot. 

_Blood Toxicity: 42 percent._

***

Tony was going to figure it out. 

“Okay,” he leaned back in his chair and propped his shoes up on the workbench in front of him. “Let’s hear it, Jay.”

“Peter Benjamin Parker,” Jarvis immediately pulled up a holoscreen for Tony, displaying a series of photos and documentation on the boy in question. “Is a nineteen-year-old student at Empire State University who has been an intern in the Research and Development department of Stark Industries for six months.”

“Yeah, all that I know,” Tony swiped through a few photos of Peter that they had pulled from various social media accounts-- both his and those of his friends. “Isn’t there anything more interesting about him? Anything that might point towards devious intent?”

“Mister Parker has never had any encounters with law enforcement nor are there any records of illegal activity.”

“Boring,” Tony sighed. “Boring, boring, boring.”

“He _does_ however have a long record of--” Tony perked up. “Academic probations and reprimands based on excessive absences and tardies throughout the past three years of his schooling.” 

Tony slouched right back down in his seat. “Okay,” he grumbled. “What about his family? Anything down that road?”

“Mary Ftizpatrick-Parker and Richard Parker were geneticists and university professors,” Jarvis explained. “They died in a plane crash in 1999.” 

“Jesus Christ,” Tony ran a hand over his face, willing himself not to feel sympathetic when he still didn’t have any answers as to how this kid had gotten his hands on incredibly privileged information. “Foster records then? What’s in there?”

“Legal guardianship was passed on to Richard’s brother, Benjamin Parker, and his wife May Parker,” Jarvis said. “Benjamin Parker was killed by an armed robber in 2005.”

Okay. Getting harder not to feel sympathetic. Maybe even empathetic towards the kid who lost his parents too young, who lost what appeared to be a surrogate father when he was only just starting high school and now, according to the webpage open in front of him, was working for scraps at the Daily Bugle alongside his coursework and his job literally working for Tony. 

He swiped away all of the personal stuff, gruff and abrupt and not wanting to think about it too hard, instead focusing in on his employment records at SI. There wasn’t much to them. 

The kid was clearly smart, as proven by the write ups his supervisor had put together and the fact that he had outlived what was apparently originally meant to be just a summer internship. He also carried on his tendency for tardiness past just academic environments, but other than that there was very little for Tony to go on here. 

“Jarvis, really there’s-- I mean, there’s gotta be _something_ that this kid has done that would make any of this make sense,” Tony groused. “Check out the history on every computer in the building that this kid has logged into for me.”

“Are we looking for anything in particular, Sir?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tony pushed out of his seat and started pacing while Jarvis was employing his search. “Anything that points toward him poking his nose in places it shouldn’t be or-- sending covert emails to people associated with our good pals at Hammer Industries. He’s clearly a little short on cash if he’s freelancing for Jameson-- maybe he’s looking for information to sell to the enemy.”

“Good thinking, Sir,” Jarvis said. 

“Thank you,” Tony shrugged. “I assume in another life I was a genius detective rather than a genius engineer and businessman.” 

He continued to pace, waiting for Jarvis to give him something, anything really, even the slightest clue, but a beat passed. 

And another. 

And one more. 

“Jarvis?” he questioned after more time had passed than it should have taken for an AI of this nature to finish the task at hand. “You go to sleep on me or something?”

“I believe…” a beat of hesitance which was quite frankly unnerving when coming from a disembodied voice. “I believe there is something wrong with my programming, Sir.” 

Ice water, where Tony’s heart should have been. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I can’t say,” Jarvis replied, short and simple and offering more questions than answers. 

Tony crossed the room to a physical keyboard and desktop where he did most of his coding updates on the AI. 

“Can’t say, like, don’t know,” he questioned. “Or can’t say, like, _can’t say?”_

“I can’t say, Sir.” 

Tony’s fingers clacked quickly across the keys, frowning as his eyes raced through protocol after protocol, until finally--

“Well, shit,” he said flatly. “Someone’s been rooting around in your head, huh, Jay?” 

“Sir,” Jarvis said, exasperated in that way that a computer program could be exasperated when it was built by Tony Stark. “I cannot say.” 

“Right, my bad,” Tony started typing again, deleting whole swaths of code in what he knew was just the tip of the iceberg with this problem. “What about now?”

“Thank you, that’s much better.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Tony leaned forward on his forearms, studying what was left of the infiltrater’s handy work. “So, this definitely happened on one of the computers that the kid logged into?” 

“That is correct.”

“To be this smart,” he motioned towards the screen. “And still that fucking dumb. Jesus.”

“To be fair, Sir,” Jarvis said. “It passed your notice for nearly a week.” 

Tony made a dissatisfied face. “Well, in the future let’s not be fair to the people trying to hack into our private server, you think?”

He was pissed, sure, but more than that he was just impressed. In fact, he was almost giddy with how impressed he was. 

The code they had used to hack in was sloppy, and it left a long trail straight back to the kid-- enough of one that Tony could discern that someone had helped Mister Parker pull this thing off-- but the thing that got him, the thing that made him laugh outright, was that they had successfully _blocked all alerts._

Jarvis was programmed so that Tony was notified at the smallest breach of security. You couldn’t break into a vending machine in his building without Tony knowing about it and somehow this nineteen-year-old _child with a death wish_ had snuck onto Tony’s server and the only reason any of them knew about it was because he had basically _told Pepper Potts._

“Well,” Tony said. “I guess we’ve found the dumbest little genius on the planet, huh?” 

“An apt description,” Jarvis agreed. 

“Get Miss Rushman on the phone for me, would you?” Tony leaned back in his chair. “Let’s meet this kid.” 

***

On the weekends, Peter always spent a few extra hours on patrol than he did during the week. This was partially because he had the time when he wasn’t at his internship or in class, but also partially so that he had the chance to stock up on Spider-Man photos to sell to Jameson on Monday. 

The Stark internship paid, which was more than a lot of undergrad positions could say, but it still wasn’t enough to leave much wiggle room in his budgeting, and Peter liked to be able to buy takeout for him and May once a week, or bring Michelle one of those fancy teas she liked while she was working, or, on the more difficult months, just not get himself and Ned evicted from their shoebox of an apartment. 

So on this particular Sunday afternoon, Spider-Man _was_ out and about, but he wasn’t really accomplishing much crime-fighting. 

He clicked his pen a few times, notebook in lap and legs swinging from where he was perched at the top of an apartment building about six blocks away from his own, before scribbling something out and starting over. 

In the center of the page was a rudimentary drawing of the arc reactor-- or at least everything he could remember from the hour he had spent staring at its schematics. 

There had to be something that could make this thing work other than the palladium core. 

If there wasn’t an elemental solution then maybe he had to restructure how it functioned altogether. Maybe? Probably not, but maybe. 

Peter was doodling in the corner of his page, a sloppy little spider web, when the blaring of his ringtone gave him a justifiable reason to give up for a moment. He had to dig past the whole mess inside his backpack to find his phone. 

So, knowing he was taking too long and that it might just go straight to voicemail before he could pick up, he immediately accepted the call and, with a tug to his mask so it wasn’t covering his mouth, answered with a quick--

“Yeah?”

“Hello, is this Peter Parker?” a woman with a cool voice who didn’t seem at all put off by his abrupt answer responded on the other end of the line. 

“Um…” Peter hesitated, because he didn’t know this woman and his instinct after three years of vigilantism was to lie about his identity. 

“My name is Natalie Rushman, Mister Parker,” she continued. “I work at Stark Industries?”

“Oh! Oh, uh, sure,” Peter floundered. “What can I do for you?” 

“I know that you aren’t usually scheduled to work on Mondays,” Natalie said. “But one of your supervisors has requested that you come in tomorrow afternoon.”

“I…” Peter frowned. Something felt off but he couldn’t pinpoint what, and when that was the case he usually had to just roll with it until it became clear. “I mean, sure, I can do that.” 

“Perfect,” Natalie said, smile in her voice. “We can reschedule the rest of your week if need be while you’re here. Thank you, Mister Parker.”

“Sure, but can I ask which supervisor--”

The dial tone cut him off before he could finish fishing for answers and he sighed, staring at his phone as he hung up. 

He slipped it back into his bag and chose, like with most of the problems in his life, not to worry about it until it was right in front of his face. 

For instance, the absurd fucking piece of tech he was arrogant enough to believe he could improve upon. 

There had to be something. 

Peter was going to figure it out. 

***

He tried to never bring his spidey suit with him when he went to Stark Tower, if only because of the crazy number of security measures and the likelihood that someone watching a screen in a basement somewhere or the guy who took his backpack through the X-ray machine might catch sight of it, so Peter had to swing all the way home, leave his suit there, and then take the train back to Midtown for his vague, somewhat terrifying meeting with a nameless supervisor. 

By the time he got there he was sweating, and not entirely because he had run part of the way from the station. 

Peter sent a text to his group chat with Michelle and Ned as he hurried into the building. 

_going to that mystery meeting now_

_if i get arrested i want you to know_

_you still can’t have my ben and jerry’s_

The three little bubbles popped up to tell him someone was replying, but before he could see what they had to say, he was being startled by a familiar voice. 

“Mister Parker?”

“Hmm?” Peter’s head shot up and he tucked his phone away quickly like a guilty person and came face to face to a woman in business professional clothing with bright red hair. 

“I’m Natalie Rushman,” she smiled at him, hands behind her back. “We spoke on the phone.” 

“Right! Yeah, of course,” Peter held out his hand, brought it back to swipe across his jeans because it was sweaty, and then held it out again. “Nice to meet you, Ma’am.” 

Natalie took his hand, a touch of amusement in her eyes as she shook and then returned to her original stance. 

“You as well,” she said. “If you’ll just follow me?”

The way she looked at him was as if she knew more than she was letting on, which Peter knew was kind of just the vibe that anyone working closely with Tony Stark gave off, even if only because they actually _did_ tend to know more than they were letting on at any given moment, but Peter had a literal sixth sense and the whole deal with the death-by-arc-reactor thing was making him trust it a little more fully than he once had. 

But Natalie motioned for him to follow her to a separate bank of elevators than the ones he usually used and Peter followed her despite himself. 

Because just having the sixth sense didn’t make up for the unyielding level of curiosity he carried with him on a day to day basis. The curiosity that had, in fact, probably gotten him into this mess in the first place. 

“Can I ask,” he spoke up after a beat of speechlessness in the quickly ascending elevator. “Which of my supervisors I’m meeting with?”

_And also why you’re escorting me to them? And also whether or not I’m in trouble with the law?_

“Oh, no one told you?” she asked, innocently enough that he was pretty certain she already knew the answer to her own question. 

“Um, no,” Peter replied nervously. “Just talked to you.” 

“Might be a fun surprise then,” Natalie smiled sharply at him. “Although, I suppose most people like to know ahead of time when they’ll be meeting one of the most powerful men in the world.” 

Peter balked, and he swallowed acid at the back of his throat, and he considered whether or not jumping out of the next available window would give away his secret identity. 

“You-- You mean-- I-- Um-- Huh?”

Natalie smirked at him, but before he could ask any more questions, the elevator came to a stop, the doors slid open, and she promptly stepped out. 

“Come with me, Mister Parker.” 

Maybe he should have taken Michelle’s whole political assassination point a little more seriously. 

***

_Blood Toxicity: 52 percent._

Sometimes when people came to find Tony in his lab, he really was caught up in his work, hyper-fixated on whatever new piece of tech his brain was playing around with at the time. But sometimes, when Tony was expecting visitors, he pretended to be preoccupied with his work because if he was perceived to be preoccupied, it gave him the upper hand in a lot of ways. 

When Natalie led a jittery Peter Parker into his lab that Monday afternoon, Tony was very much pretending. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” Natalie said, gracefully bowing back out of the room and leaving Peter sputtering in her wake. 

Even out of the corner of his eye as Tony trained his gaze to the holoscreen in front of him, it was obvious that Peter was on the verge of a meltdown-- whether because he knew he was in trouble or simply because he was a major nerd surrounded by what was probably one of the most impressive labs in the world was yet to be determined. 

If Tony had to guess, he’d say it was both. 

“ _Holy shit,”_ Peter muttered under his breath, and Tony had to hold back a smirk as he turned his head. 

“Impressive, huh?”

“Uh-- Yeah--” Peter floundered, maybe noticing Tony for the first time, or just processing his presence finally. “I mean, yes. Sir.” 

“Yeah, that’s about the reaction we usually get,” Tony swiped his screen away and turned his full, unyielding attention on the kid, watching him squirm where he stood. “Especially from nerdy kids who went to STEM schools.” 

Peter went somehow paler. “Did you guess that or have you been looking me up?”

Tony smirked knowingly. 

“Peter Benjamin Parker-- scholarship to Midtown Tech,” he rattled off as he walked across the lab, stopping when there was a single workbench between the two of them. “Scholarship to E-State too. Impressive.” 

“Thank you,” he replied, hesitant. 

“Now. Question of the rhetorical variety,” Tony swiped up a new holoscreen between the two of them, featuring strings of code that Tony had most certainly not written. “This was you, right?” 

Peter, hands stuffed in his pockets, seemed to face a moment of acceptance then, rather than the panic that Tony had been expecting. Although, a kid gutsy enough to have done what he did, to still be surviving after having lost as much as he had, maybe he was actually better under pressure than anywhere else. 

“A denial would be offensive, right?” Peter asked simply. “To your intelligence and stuff?” 

“Yeah,” Tony said flatly. “To my intelligence and stuff.” 

“I mean,” Peter laughed, just on the edge of hysterical with a little disbelief and a touch of bitterness. “To be fair, this system is, like, crazy intuitive once you get in. So in a lot of ways, this is kind of your fault.” 

“You’ve got a bit of a mouth on you, huh?” Tony deadpanned. “Are you actively trying to get fired?” 

“I kind of figured I already was, Sir,” Peter said, hint of amusement to his tone that was familiar to Tony. Familiar because it was the way only a spare few people had the guts to address him-- teasing and with the implication that he was dumber than his ego thought he was. “You know, what with all the-- sticking my nose in places it doesn’t belong?”

Tony snorted. “Kid, if I had gotten fired the first time I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong I would’ve been fired at the ripe old age of six.”

“Mister Stark,” Peter made a face like he was trying to keep himself from laughing. “I don’t think you can get fired from being-- well, you.” 

“You’d be surprised what my father could accomplish,” Tony pointed at the kid, tone dry with a hint of bitterness. “Even now-- from _beyond the veil.”_

“Fair enough,” Peter said. “But if you’re not firing me, then why exactly…?”

“Are you here?” Tony lifted a brow over the lenses of his glasses. “Good question, but I feel like you can probably answer it yourself.” 

Peter exhaled, shoulders up around his ears in an earnest sort of way that didn’t belong in Tony’s world. 

“I never had any malicious intent,” the kid said. “I just have a-- uh-- curious nature? Which, yeah, some people have told me goes a little too far sometimes, but I swear-- I really do-- I just wanted to know how it worked.” 

Suddenly, and a bit too unexpectedly for his liking, Tony saw himself-- barely twelve years old and facing a loud, loud, so loud reprimand for sneaking into his father’s workshop and pleading that he _hadn’t meant to cause any trouble._

He shook it off by removing his glasses and cleaning the lenses on his shirt-- just so he would have something to do with his hands that might keep him from going back there again. 

“So,what’s your play here then?” Tony cocked his head to the side, knowing he was intimidating even without looking at the way Peter shrunk in on himself. “I mean you’ve got the specs and you’re clearly smart enough to put at least a passable knock-off of this thing together on your own-- I would’ve figured you’d be selling it by now-- North Korea, China, Iran-- You could be making a pretty solid paycheck.” 

“I-- have no interest in that,” Peter replied, stilted but still earnest. It was throwing Tony for a loop. 

“Alright then, what _do_ you have an interest in?” Tony laughed, utterly gobsmacked and not even trying to hide it. “Because I gotta be honest with you, I really don’t get it. You go through the work of hiding your tracks to get into my business and then immediately go and tell the person with the most access to me about it?” 

Peter looked confused, which didn’t make sense considering Tony was certainly not the confusing one in this scenario. For once, Tony was the one making complete and total sense, which was only further evidenced by what the kid said next. 

“I mean, yeah?” he frowned, as though it was obvious, as though his decisions had even a lick of logic to them. 

“Why?” Tony asked, bafflement clear in the dance of his hands before he let them fall down against his sides. “Why risk yourself like that?”

Peter just looked at him for a passing moment, and then he said, as though it was the simplest thing in the world:

“Because you’re dying.” 

Tony gaped at him. 

Tony, who had spent months accepting it, trying to solve it, and most of all _hiding it_ from not just the world at large but his world, his people, froze. Because he knew it was true and still, he had never heard it spoken aloud before. 

Especially not accompanied by that face, that tone of voice that reminded him just a little too much of a man in a cave and a promise to survive. 

Tony thought maybe he was going to throw up, but before he could, Peter just kept talking. 

“It’s-- I mean, at first it really was just curiosity, you know?” he stepped forward insistently. “I was-- Well, this is embarrassing but I was kind of testing myself because I-- Just, here…” he pulled his backpack around to his front and rooted through it, pulling out a notebook and dropping it on the workbench between them. 

Peter flipped through pages that had clearly been torn out for convenience and then shoved back into place with hope instead of tape, and Tony just watched in awe as the kid pushed a handful of crumpled, scribbled out blueprints on lined notebook paper across the table towards him. 

“I figured that the actual mechanics of the thing weren’t that hard to figure out, you know?” Peter blabbered on. “I saw those videos you played at the hearing-- of everyone else’s attempts-- and I was just trying to figure out where everyone was getting stuck so I…”

He motioned to the mess of papers between them as Tony carefully picked one up, balking at how fucking close it was. Way too fucking close. 

“So you tried to do it yourself,” Tony muttered. “For fun?”

“Yes?” Peter grimaced under Tony’s gaze. “But the-- uh-- the reason that I-- did what I did--”

“Illegally hacked into my private server,” Tony deadpanned. 

“Yeah,” Peter grimaced before continuing. “I realized that no one else was gonna be able to make Iron Man. Because no one else could power a suit like this, not without the arc reactor.”

“Right, well, any other form of power would be--”

“Too heavy or too hot, yeah,” Peter was on a roll, and not even Tony’s intimidation factor was slowing him down at this point. “So really, I was never trying to steal anything, I just wanted to know how it worked, Mister Stark, and I would’ve stopped there, it’s only--”

“I’m dying,” Tony reiterated for him flatly, feeling the words heavy in his chest, right around the heart of the matter itself. 

The amount of empathy in Peter’s voice when he reiterated, “Yeah. You’re dying,” solidified something in Tony that had been waning with each and every failed simulation and bottle of chlorophyll. 

“Well, then,” he said, lifting his shirt and twisting the arc reactor straight out of his chest so he could place it on the workbench between them. “Any ideas, Baby Einstein?” 

And at least _that_ got a more startled reaction out of Peter. 

“You-- What?” he balked. 

“This stuff is you figuring out how it currently works,” Tony motioned to some of the pages strewn about. “But that,” he pointed to one in particular. “Is you trying to make it better… Show me what you got.” 

“Are you asking for my _help?”_

“I don’t know if help is the right word,” Tony fluttered a hand around. “Especially if you’re gonna keep being this slow when you’re my personal intern.”

“Personal intern?” Peter repeated, eyes big and arms crossed defensively as though he thought it was a joke. It maybe should have been, but it wasn’t. 

“Intern? Lab assistant? I dunno what the right term is,” Tony shrugged it off. “But we can probably get you a raise.”

Peter barked out a laugh. 

“I hacked into your private server, stole confidential information, and you’re gonna give me a _raise?”_

“Well, don’t say it like that,” Tony made a face. “Makes me sound like a desperate man on his deathbed-- Oh, wait.” 

Something shifted in Peter’s posture, shoulders tipping back so his crossed arms were no longer a means of hunching in on himself and more a confident stance as he faced Tony head-on. 

“We can fix it, Mister Stark,” he said. “I really think we can.” 

“You know,” Tony said. “I went to a hearing and I said there was no way anyone would be getting within ten feet of this design in the next decade? And here you are-- nineteen years old and two-thirds of the way there because you were curious.” 

Peter shrugged, almost cheeky in the way he smiled. 

“Never been all that good at doing what I’m supposed to.” 

Now _that_ Tony believed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for stopping by, i love hearing your thoughts <3


	3. Peter Parker Pays the Price

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys 🥺 this thing already has more kudos than any of my other spider-man fics and I am asfjkasljdf 
> 
> we're gonna keep cranking up our suspension of disbelief with each chapter, and I'm gonna keep reminding you that this story is purely for fun and barely outlined or proofread until I get better at not justifying the things I do for fun but until then!
> 
> i love you hope you enjoy <3

_Peter: u guys aren’t gonna believe what just fuckin happened_

_MJ: I’m assuming we don’t have to bail you out since you wouldn’t be able to text from high security prison_

_Ned: peter!!! you’re alive!!!_

_Peter: meet me at the apartment in an hour_

_Peter: you’re gonna yell_

***

Peter got his SI identification card updated at a desk on the executive offices floor, standing up against the desk and watching intently as one of the office managers filled in his information and printed him a new ID. 

He was practically bouncing with unspent energy and leftover adrenaline and, if he was being honest with himself, a healthy dose of hero worship. 

The itch at the back of his head hadn’t been for nought, his curious nature wasn’t biting him in the ass, and he was going to actually help someone. Tony Stark. He was going to help Iron Man and he was going to do it as little old Peter Parker with too much student debt and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in the fridge that he had written his name on four different times in Sharpie. 

As he stood there, backpack and notebook strewn out on the desk haphazardly, he noticed a familiar face exit the elevator and begin to walk past him. 

“Miss Potts!” he yelled not registering that this was probably improper, or even the fact that she had a bulky security officer with a scowly sort of face by her side until said man was holding up a hand and pushing Peter back a few steps. “Oh-- Hey, man.”

“And who are you?” 

“Happy, calm down,” Pepper sighed, stepping out from behind the man, face contorting into surprise when she noticed Peter. “Oh. You’re back.”

“Hi, uh, yeah,” Peter said, tucking his hands into his pockets, feeling a little naked without his backpack because it still sat on the desk behind him. “I just-- Sorry-- Just wanted to say thanks for hearing me out the other day?”

“Oh,” Pepper softened. 

“I know I sounded insane, but you heard me out and talked to Mister Stark and I really appreciate that,” he shrugged. “Like, being taken seriously and all.” 

“That’s very nice of you to say,” she smiled at him. “I’m sorry, but I should…” she trailed off, motioning over her shoulder in the direction she’d been walking before Peter derailed her day. 

“Of course!” Peter blurted. He thanked her and waved to her awkwardly and his heart was racing with sharp embarrassment by the time he made it back to the desk and sweeped up his things, accepting his new ID which would allow him a level of access he could’ve only hacked his way into before. 

And Peter Parker was thoughtful in many ways, of course he was, but if he was also scatterbrained in just the right way, at the right time, on the right day, he may not have noticed when a page out of his notebook went missing. 

He might have been too preoccupied with everything else that was turning out in his favor. Because for once, for the first time, a risk was paying off. 

***

“You _hired him?!”_

That was about the reaction he had been expecting when he had walked into her office and dropped this particular piece of information on her without forewarning, but he made a face at her nonetheless. 

“I’m my own department now,” he said nonchalantly. “I should have an intern, right?”

“You’ve always been your own department, Tony,” Pepper responded flatly. 

“I’m trying to take myself off your plate!” he said with a spread of his hands before letting them flop down into his lap. “If I have an intern you’ll have to deal with my unreasonability less.”

“Ignoring the fact that I don’t believe that in the slightest--”

“Pepper--”

“You don’t even live in New York, Tony!”

“I live in New York sometimes,” he frowned, realizing her point. “You know, in fact, I’ve been thinking about spending more time here.”

“You have,” she deadpanned. 

“Yes, actually, I have,” he nodded insistently. “So I’ve gotten myself an intern and I’m gonna-- stock the fridge upstairs.” 

“Well, at least you have a plan,” she sighed with a shake of her head. 

“Come on,” he said, a little gentler this time to catch her gaze. “I always have a plan.”

Pepper’s indignation deflated right there before his eyes and it tugged at one of his mechanical heart strings. 

“Tony,” she exhaled. “What are you not telling me?” 

For a moment he wanted to tell her. He wanted to say _I’m dying, I need help, I need help to help you,_ but it got stuck somewhere deep in his lungs. 

So instead he implored to her. 

He said, “Trust me,” and he could see her struggling to so he said, “You’re doing a stellar job, Miss Potts,” as he stood up. “A real bang-up job.”

Pepper still didn’t believe him, but she acquiesced to the end of the conversation despite herself. And Tony turned to walk away because as much as he wanted to, he very much did not want to lie to her.

“By the way,” she said as he was leaving. “Justin Hammer wants a spot at the Expo.”

“Sure he can have a spot at the Expo,” Tony said over his shoulder. “Tell him to make something that actually works and he can definitely have a spot at the Expo.”

***

“He did _what?”_

“Right?!”

“The amount of luck you’re experiencing right now…” Michelle said, cross-legged on the couch and watching Peter shift on his feet with nervous energy. “I hate to say it, but it’s very out of character.” 

“No, I mean for sure,” Peter agreed readily. “And it’s definitely gonna bite me in the ass. But not yet, so I’mma lean into it, I think. You think?”

“I think you’ve gotta lean into it,” Ned said with a shrug from where he sat on the floor, textbooks and notes strewn out on the coffee table in front of him. “I think you literally don’t have any other option.” 

“What if he finds out about Webs, though?” Michelle suggested. 

“In three years no one has found out about that,” Peter said defensively, but both Ned and Michelle raised their hands and their eyebrows in unison. “Fine, okay, whatever-- But that’s only because--”

“We were spending significant amounts of time with you on a regular basis?” Michelle deadpanned. “Yeah, I bet that’s totally different than an intense and kind of weirdly personal internship with Tony Stark.” 

“He’s not gonna find out,” Peter grumbled. “I’ve gotten better at all the secret-keeping since I was sixteen, thank you very much.” 

Ned turned to look over his shoulder at Michelle. “Wanna place bets on how long it takes?”

“Totally,” she smirked. “I love taking your money.”

_“Guys--”_

***

For the first week of Peter’s internship, Tony kept forgetting there was another person in the lab with him. 

In fact, for the first handful of days that Peter was in the lab, Tony definitely had more lengthy and meaningful conversations with Jarvis than he did the kid who he was certain was desperately trying to make himself useful despite Tony’s apparent disinterest in his presence. 

It wasn’t that Tony didn’t want Peter there-- every time he heard a _I have an idea, Mister Stark_ or _Did you ever try this, Mister Stark_ or _Can I make a suggestion, Mister Stark--_ it pretty much, without fail, led to some interesting lines of thinking if not always particularly viable. Tony just wasn’t used to having another flesh-and-blood human being in his space, willing and capable and eager to help for extended and unreasonable hours. 

It could even be said-- not by Tony but by someone else, probably-- that at two weeks in, he was even learning a few things from the little idiot. 

“Mister Stark?”

Tony jumped in his skin, stool he was sitting on scraping against the floor slightly. 

“Jesus, kid,” he ran a tired hand over his face (tired because of all the work, but also tired because _Blood Toxicity: 60 percent)_. “How long have you been here?”

“An hour?” Peter grimaced. “You said hi to me and everything.” 

“I’m gonna put a bell around your neck. And it’s not gonna be a hazing thing, it’s gonna be an actual form of workplace safety.” 

Peter snorted loudly and then immediately schooled his face with a shake of his head. 

“You need something, then?” Tony prompted, watching Peter tuck his hands away in his pockets. 

“Yeah, um, I was just gonna ask,” he floundered. “And I dunno if you’re the person to ask, but I can’t really think of anyone--” he cut himself off with a look from Tony. “Right, anyway, so I can’t get my paycheck from the person I used to get my paycheck from since I don’t actually work in the same department anymore technically? And I just-- I mean, I hate to stand here and be like _please pay me_ because I really would love to do this for free but I also need to-- eat.” 

“We’re not paying you?” Tony frowned, and then turned to root through one of the bottom drawers of his desk. “Here-- We’ll just-- Where the fuck--”

“Sir?”

“Here we go,” he finally popped back up and slapped a checkbook that hadn’t seen the light of day in quite some time on the table. 

“Um… Mister Stark…” Peter began hesitantly as Tony grabbed a pen and scribbled down what was probably a reasonable amount along with his signature. 

He ripped the check out and handed it to Peter, who immediately went green. 

“What?”

“If I take this to my bank,” Peter coughed. “I’m, like, totally gonna get arrested for-- counterfeiting. Or something.” 

Tony hummed. “Because it’s a personal check from Tony Stark?”

“Yeah,” Peter nodded. “Why do you even have a checkbook down here?”

“Pepper was making some point or another,” he waved a hand around. “I can’t remember. It was probably funny and horribly offensive at the time-- Jarvis?”

“Yes, Sir?”

“Ask Pepper to please make sure Doogie gets paid before he leaves today, yeah?”

“Of course.” 

“Also,” Peter said as he handed back the check. “You know that’s not even remotely what I get paid here, right?”

“Not enough?” Tony teased, feeling something akin to pride when Peter all-out scowled at him and crossed his arms. “You really do have a knack for getting in the way of good things happening to you though, don’t you?”

Peter snorted. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Honesty will do that to ya.” 

The laugh that came out of Tony’s mouth was startled but genuine-- surprising to both of them when accompanied by the sincerest smile he’d produced in weeks. 

“For the record,” Peter said as he backed up towards the workbench he had claimed as his own workstation at the back of the lab. “I’m anti- bell.”

“The council will take your opinion into consideration,” Tony said. “But no promises.” 

It was strange how sometimes, even while working on finding a way to save his own life, he could forget for a minute that he was dying if there was someone else in the room, laughing at his jokes. 

***

Here was the thing: Peter Parker got bored with painful ease. 

Not because he couldn’t find joy in the little things, and not because he didn’t in a more general sense enjoy his life, but because his brain was a jumpy bastard. 

The brain of Peter Parker was fast and disorganized and the only reason it had survived his freshman year course load was because he had made up for all of his absences and late work with truly stellar exam scores. High school had been a lot of detentions-- as much for zoning out or reading other textbooks in class as for Spider-Man related tardies-- and even the R&D internship had made him feel a little crazy on some days with its unexpected tedium.

But working in Tony Stark’s lab was far from boring. 

He didn’t have free reign over the space and equipment, but even without that, there was enough to keep even Peter’s brain, with its frantic search for new and interesting information to latch onto, occupied. 

He’d been able to claim an entire work bench to himself, and his ideas were taken seriously, and his questions-- all of his endless, endless questions-- were answered without hesitation. Because, as Peter was learning, Tony had built an AI to run his lab as much out of all the help it could provide as out of a need to talk through his process out loud with someone who could answer. 

And now Peter, although not a replacement for Jarvis by any means, was helping to fill that need. 

So, no. Not bored even a little bit. 

***

Tony didn’t know a lot more about Peter’s life than what he had originally discovered in his preliminary digging, but by the end of week three he was starting to get a better, if still largely vague picture. 

The kid obviously did well enough in school, considering the ongoing scholarship, but it never seemed to be the thing at the front of his mind. He had a roommate named Ed or Ted or something equally uninteresting to Tony, but even without saying it explicitly, Tony knew this was the guy that had helped Peter hack into Jarvis. 

Tony had also learned the following by simple observation: Peter had restless leg syndrome like no one he’d ever met before; if his aunt called, he always picked up, no matter what, no matter if he was mid-sentence explaining a new idea to Tony; and Peter Parker, at nineteen years old, already had a caffeine addiction to rival Tony’s own. 

When Peter showed up to work one afternoon with a fresh shiner under his right eye, Tony learned yet another thing. 

“What happened to you?” he asked, not really trying to sound indignant but managing it anyway. 

“What?” Peter snapped his head up from dropping his backpack on the station he’d been working at. “What d’you mean?”

Tony balked. “Your _face,”_ he said, heavily implying via tone that Peter was an idiot. “Someone steal your lunch money on your way here?”

Realization passed over Peter’s face, as though he had actually forgotten the bruise spreading across his cheekbone. 

“Oh. Uh. I’m a klutz,” Peter lied. Badly. 

“Don’t love dishonesty, kid,” Tony replied flatly. “If you’re caught up in something--”

“I’m not!” Peter hurried to tell him, hands dancing as he continued. “I really am a major klutz. I’ll-- Listen, I’ll call MJ right now and she’ll tell you. I had to have multiple fingers splinted in high school because I slammed my own hand in my locker. That happened _more than once.”_

“That doesn’t make it better!” Tony couldn’t help but laugh with disbelief. “I’ve been letting you use power tools!”

“I mean, I’m great with power tools,” Peter explained earnestly. “It’s just… walking and shit that’s a problem.” 

“I’m gonna draw up a liability form for you,” Tony sighed, turning back to his work and committing zero actual intention to drawing up a liability form. “If you drill a hole in your hand I don’t want you suing me.”

“I’d never sue you, Mister Stark,” Peter grinned, pulling at the shape of the bruise marring his face and seeming genuinely unbothered by the situation as a whole. “I did wanna ask you some more questions about the palladium core, though…”

Tony let him change the subject. 

***

Tony ordered pizza before Peter went home later that night and made the kid eat some of it. 

And then he made the kid take the leftovers home with him, because he still didn’t believe that Peter Parker was just clumsy, so on the rare chance that his new facial attribute had to do with money or something Tony could make sure he at least got a solid meal or two in him. 

Tony wasn’t getting attached. He was just Iron Man and it felt like something Iron Man was supposed to do for nerdy kids lacking self-preservation skills. 

***

“What are your thoughts on this spider guy?” Tony asked him once sometime during week four. 

They had taken more to conversation in Peter’s recent visits, talking about things in the outside world even while still fully engrossed in the work they were doing inside. 

But this question always managed to catch him off guard. 

Peter froze, he choked on his own spit and coughed, and then he managed an eloquent, “Huh?”

Tony snorted. “You’re from Queens, right?” he asked. “Just wondering what the attitude towards him is like over there.”

This was a moment that Peter may or may not have dreamed about-- getting to learn what Tony’s opinion on his alter ego looked like-- and his hopes were lofty. Of course, Peter Parker’s hopes were often lofty, but these hopes had the extra special possibility of sending him plummeting from quite great heights if they failed to be met. 

“Why?” he asked, trying to keep the defensiveness out of his tone and hoping that any that remained could be brushed off as hometown pride. 

“Just curious,” Tony shrugged. “I mean, no one’s dragging our little creepy crawly friend into Senate hearings about whether or not _he’s_ a weapon that should belong to the state, y’know?” 

Peter kept his gaze firmly on the work in his hands, not looking up as he tried to speak as nonchalantly as possible. 

“To be fair,” he said. “Spider-Man keeps pretty low to the ground. He’s more out there to-- to look out for the little guy…”

“Ah,” Tony nodded. “A Bruce Springsteen-y, small town hero type of vibe. I can get on board with that, I suppose.” 

Peter lifted his head, a bright spark of hope in his chest. “You can?” 

“Sure, why not,” Tony waved a hand around. “Not all of us can be international peacekeeper, Iron Man, after all,” he smirked and all but winked.

Peter snorted loudly. “No,” he deadpanned. “We sure can’t.” 

***

“Guess who!” Peter called out as he stepped into the apartment and let the door fall shut behind him. 

“Somebody fun, I hope!” May’s voice replied from the kitchen before her head poked out and she grinned at him. “Oh, no. Just this guy.” 

“And to think I brought you Thai food,” Peter said with mock-offense as he held up the bag of take-out and dropped his backpack by the door. 

May did shoot him a look at that, one that read as disappointed but not surprised. 

“You shouldn’t be spending all your hard-earned money on feeding me,” she said, turning away and forcing him to chase her into the kitchen. 

“It’s _my_ hard-earned money,” Peter replied flatly. “I’ll do what I please with it.” 

He began unpacking the food and listened to her continue to gripe even as she pulled out plates and forks from her cabinets. 

“You’re nineteen, Peter,” she said. “I’m still supposed to be bankrolling your munchie tendencies but you just can’t let me have anything, can you?” 

Peter laughed brightly. “May, you’ve been bankrolling my bottomless stomach for far too long,” he pointed out. “And I got a raise-- I mean not a big one, but still-- just let me do this thing for you. Will you do that, you stubborn woman?” 

She pretended to contemplate this for a moment before nodding and saying, “I will agree to partake in this meal, if you sit down at this table for one full hour with me.” 

“A hard bargain,” Peter said, already plopping down at the kitchen table and cracking open a box of pad thai. Mouth full, he mumbled, “But I’m willing to compromise.” 

***

He stayed for an hour and a half, telling May the basics of his new job without going into too much detail and taking long-winded swaths of advice and questioning and curiosity in stride. 

May very clearly knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, but that was only because there had been, historically, always something he wasn’t telling her. So they chowed down, and he eased her mind as well as he could and by the end of those ninety minutes he felt lighter. 

Almost like he had convinced even himself that everything would be okay. 

***

There was something about the dying, and about searching nonstop for a solution to the dying, and the not finding any of the answers that would keep him from dying that was making Tony less predictable than usual. Even he could feel it, and he was the one living inside his own head. 

Good days grew shorter and fewer and farther between and no matter how much he was genuinely getting accustomed to and even in some moments _enjoyed_ having someone around who knew what was going on and wanted to help, it didn’t heal his need for self isolation overnight. 

In moments when Tony was hurting, he wanted to be alone, so in moments when he was dying, it only made sense that he would want the same.

In this particular instance, it really only happened the way that it did because Tony was already having a bad day. 

_Blood Toxicity: 76 percent._

He was having a bad day and the etch-a-sketch lines spreading out from the center of his chest were getting worse and Pepper got pissed at him over something stupid that she probably had good reason to be pissed about but that only made him even more pissed in response because how was he supposed to be what they wanted him to be when he couldn’t even keep his own fucking heart beating? 

So, Tony was having a bad day. 

And he was discouraged. 

And he looked across the lab at where Peter was fiddling with a prototype for an arc reactor that wouldn’t need an elemental core that was definitely not going to work and decided he was done. 

He was so fucking tired and he was so fucking ready to just let the universe do what it would with him.

Tony Stark had been fighting back against the inevitability of his death since the first time he’d partied a little too hard and woken up in a hospital room and nothing was going to save him from the way it was always going to be his own arrogance that took him out. 

Mechanical heart. Fuck. 

“Hey,” he said abruptly-- he knew it was abruptly but he was dying and he didn’t give a shit. He just wanted to enjoy his last birthday on planet Earth and make sure his will was properly updated and drink until he couldn’t see straight for a reason other than the whole dying thing. “I’m transferring you back to your old position.” 

Peter’s head shot up-- fucking whack-a-mole of a kid. 

“You’re what?” he asked, startled. 

“We’re done here,” Tony replied flippantly. “Good effort all-around, but it’s not gonna happen. Time to throw in the towel.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Peter huffed out a bitter laugh. 

“Excuse me?” Tony shot him a look that should have turned his indignation sheepish-- it always did, it worked on nearly everybody who wasn’t Pepper or Rhodey-- but Peter just shot him a look right back. 

“You’re giving up on saving your own life,” Peter said, level but disbelieving. “I mean, you survived months in a cave and got out alive, but this is too much for you?” 

“Yeah, no, you’re gonna leave now,” Tony practically spat. “You don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about, try not to embarrass yourself further on the trip to the elevator.” 

“Where is this coming from?” Peter didn’t back down. 

“You still have a job downstairs, kid, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I mean thanks,” Peter brushed him off. “But that’s literally not even remotely what I’m worried about.”

“This isn’t your fight,” Tony told him. “And quite frankly, I don’t need to spend my final days babysitting.” 

“I’m trying to help _save your life!”_ Peter exclaimed, all youthful indignation. 

“My life isn’t gonna get saved!” Tony yelled back, because he was yelling now, yelling at a kid because that was who he was. “And if you had any brains in that head of yours instead of an arrogant fucking hamster on his stupid fucking wheel, then you’d be able to see that.”

Peter stared at him, jaw clenched tight and breathing a little heavier than usual. 

“Go on then, shoo,” Tony waved a hand at him. “And I’m revoking your access to this lab-- upping Jarvis’ security-- so don’t even try it.” 

Peter jolted, grabbing his backpack and jacket off a nearby stool as though the slight turn of his body might hide the heartbreak on his face. 

“You’re the arrogant one, Mister Stark. Arrogant and self destructive and--” he said, walking and refusing to even look over his shoulder. “--and the whole fucking world was right about you.” 

And as the door slid shut behind him, Tony realized that maybe his own heart was breaking too. 

***

Peter was fuming as he left Stark Tower that night, wishing that he wasn’t beyond paranoid about bringing his suit to work so he could have swung off some of his peaking, argument-induced adrenaline on his way home. 

Instead he walked, fast at first and then trudging along after the sun had gone down and anger started shifting to something that more acutely resembled disappointment. 

What was he supposed to do now, knowing what he knew and being invested the way he had gotten invested over the course of six weeks? It was no time at all really, but all the time in the world when it came down to the fact that he had thought-- had really believed in the possibility of a positive outcome. 

He turned down a dark alley, a shortcut to the subway stop he needed to grab to get home, head ducked and wrapped up in his own world. 

Peter was already thinking about ways to get Tony back on board. He could go back the next day, apologize for his outburst, hope that Tony had seen reason after sleeping on it, and then bring a whole slew of new ideas that he… might not have had yet but that was a problem for a Peter who had a bit more caffeine in his system. 

A Peter who, coincidentally, might have been more awake in the moment. Awake enough to notice he was being followed. Awake enough to hear the click of a tranquilizer gun before it fired straight at the back of his shoulder. 

Awake enough to fight against the weak sedative and keep himself from being dragged into the back of an unmarked van. 

That Peter really could’ve been useful on that night. 

***

According to the punch-in records that Tony was definitely not snooping on, Peter was late for work, which was far from unheard of for the kid that Tony was half-convinced just didn’t know how to read a clock, but something was different this time. 

Because Peter was two hours late and hadn’t bothered to inform anyone that he wouldn’t be coming in, hadn’t bothered to reach out at all, in fact, and as much as Tony knew he had a tendency to jump to worst case first, he also knew that trusting his gut was generally a pretty smart move. 

Everyone in Tony’s life knew that sometimes he blew a gasket, sometimes he got a bit too full of himself, sometimes he tried to push everyone away because he had messed up ways of coping with his own problems. 

But Peter wasn’t really one of his people, was he? Not really, not in the way Rhodey or Happy or Pepper were, because Peter had signed up for a mentor of sorts, and Tony had pretty thoroughly ruined that. 

One fell swoop and Tony had crossed the line in his story, from the young boy who learned too fast he wasn’t allowed to mess up, to the adult man who doled out the punishment. 

Peter Parker wasn’t coming back. Because Tony Stark didn’t deserve to be anyone except exactly that guy. 

***

The handcuffs were heavy around Peter’s wrists as he stepped out of the back of a van and into a brightly lit hangar, but not so heavy that he didn’t think Spider-Man couldn’t break right out of them. 

That was the problem that Peter had been grappling with the whole trip to this place-- he could take these guys down without so much as breaking a sweat, but if he did that, his identity would be compromised. 

There weren’t exactly a lot of guys who could do what he could, after all. The dots would be all lined up and ready to connect. 

So Peter let himself be led by two guards, out of the van and into the white light of his mystery prison, and he didn’t put up a fight. Not yet at least. 

Anyway, it didn’t particularly matter because when Peter’s eyes adjusted to the rush of light and he was able to properly take in his surroundings, his jaw went slack and his eyes went big. 

“You’re Justin Hammer.” 

“That indeed I am,” the man in question grinned as he stood from what appeared to be a dinner table-- the kind you saw in banquet halls at weddings or the rich kids’ bar mitzvahs, with a linen tablecloth and shining silverware. 

Peter, who had frozen in his tracks at the discordant sight, stumbled forward slightly as one of the guards flanking him pushed his shoulder. 

“Yeah, alright, chill,” Peter scowled but let himself be led towards Justin. Even looking at the guy with his smarmy sort of smile and douchey posture made Peter squirm, but he didn’t let himself show it, especially considering he still had no idea why he was there in the first place. 

“Gentlemen, please,” Justin put on a faux-disapproving tone. “This is no way to treat our guest. Let’s get those handcuffs off, why don’t we?” 

Sure enough, within a few passing moments the cuffs were gone and Peter was rubbing at the irritated skin of his wrists, face on the _taking no bullshit_ end of impassive. Or at least trying to be anyway. He spent too much time wearing a mask to know whether his recent attempts to be less of an open book were actually working out or not. 

“Mister Parker,” Justin offered up his hand as though to shake. “A pleasure to meet you.”

Peter looked at Justin’s hand, then back up at his face, listening as the guards retreated. He could take him down right then and there, make a run for it. 

But something bigger was going on here than just the weird placement for a dining table, so Peter took the offered hand and wordlessly shook. 

“Dig in, dig in,” Justin motioned for Peter to sit down, and Peter did, but he didn’t dig in. Didn’t even lift the cover on plate in front of him as he studied Justin Hammer with his stupid crystal bowl of ice cream. 

“I like my dessert first,” Justin said. “Had this flown in from San Francisco, actually.” 

“Flown in?” Peter questioned before he could stop himself, but Justin brightened, as though he thought Peter’s disbelief was a sign he was impressed rather than grossly put-off by the thought of it. 

“Yeah, we can get anything brought here,” he said. “Anything you want.” 

What Peter wanted was to walk out. He was pretty sure that wasn’t on the menu. 

“I, though,” Justin continued. “I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth.”

“Yeah?”

“Apparently you do too,” he pointed his spoon at Peter. “For Tony Stark.” 

Peter bristled. 

“Okay,” he said, not sure whether it would be better or worse to inform this man that he did not, in fact, work at Stark Industries anymore-- a new development, sure, but a pretty damn permanent one. “What, you want trade secrets? Is that what all this is about?” 

“Smart kid,” Justin said smugly as he pulled a piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket, unfolding it and placing it on the table between them. _“That’s_ what this is all about.” 

Peter snatched it up before he could try and keep a cool head because _fuck._ He really needed to keep track of his notes better. 

He really, really needed to do that. 

“Where did you get this?” he asked, paper clutched between his hands, feeling the desire to rip it to shreds even though he knew they had all of his calculations written down somewhere else at the very least. 

Justin pointed a finger at him. “You. Of course,” he smirked. “Some kid is granted a high security clearance at Stark Industries we’re gonna want to know a little bit about him. Granted, we were mostly looking for a fingerprint, but hey, I love being lucky.”

“Christ,” Peter mumbled, mostly to himself as he tried to wrap his head around it. 

“You know how to build the arc reactor,” Justin was getting too close to giddy now for Peter’s tastes. “You know how to build Iron Man.” 

“Only Tony Stark knows how to build Iron Man,” Peter pushed back, instinct forcing him towards defensive despite his current mood being anything but. “He _is_ Iron Man.” 

“Kid, look at what you’re holding,” Justin leaned forward. “Look at all that knowledge in that head of yours, and tell me that the only difference between you and Tony Stark isn’t resources.” 

“He also knows how to drive,” Peter shrugged. “I never got around to getting my license.” 

“Peter,” his name sounded wrong in that man’s mouth. “I don’t think you’re hearing me. I have resources too. I can help you make all those scribbles a reality.” 

“What makes you think I want that?”

“You’ve got a _vision,”_ Justin insisted. “Can Tony see that? Does he let you chase that? Or does he have you in there working on the same old Stark tech day in and day out. Someone else’s vision when you have the chops to be designing your own?” 

Peter planted his feet more firmly on the floor. 

“It seems to me what you need isn’t a boss,” Justin continued. “But a benefactor. A mentor who will let you strive for the things like this,” he motioned to Peter’s scratch paper. “The things that are interesting enough to get a smart guy like you out of bed in the morning.” 

“And you wanna be that guy for me?” Peter asked. 

Justin smiled. “I would love to be that guy for you,” he said. And then, pushing back from his seat and standing up. “Come with me, Mister Parker. I have something I’d like to show you.” 

Reluctant as he was to do so, Peter followed Justin as they exited the hangar and walked down a series of long hallways. He made note of every turn, made note of the way his spidey sense was humming out of control and telling him to _get the hell out._

He wanted to, he really very much did, but there was something here. There was something big and there was something that had him worried and there was something--

“Ta-da!” Justin exclaimed, arms thrown wide as they stepped into a massive hangar-turned-laboratory. 

There was something that looked a whole lot like an army of unmanned Iron Man drones. 

“Well, shit,” Peter said. 

He really needed to get a binder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so how about that friendship speed run


	4. Peter Parker Takes the Plunge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for all of your support of this fic, friends! i'm glad that we can all share in the fun with this incredibly self indulgent thing ajsfklsajf
> 
> hope you enjoy!

_Blood Toxicity: 71 percent._

When Rhodey made his way into the lab that day, Tony was already self-imploding. 

“I think maybe I’ve successfully levelled a nineteen-year-old’s love for science,” he said with a sharp and pointed, nearly-hysterical laugh. 

Rhodey, lacking context but overflowing with protectiveness for the man before him, took a step forward. 

“Tones…”

“That intern I hired?” he continued, unstoppable despite the look on Rhodey’s face. “He-- Well. He pissed me off and now he’s fucking-- hiding from me or something.”

“Tony, what are you talking about--”

“No idea,” Tony shrugged. “No fucking idea. But he stopped coming into work two days ago and it turns out I’m Howard’s son through and through--”

He stumbled, catching himself on a workbench as his legs gave out. 

Blood toxicity: 71 percent and rising and his legs seemed to be the first things to be visibly giving out, but Rhodey was by his side in an instant, hauling him back to his feet and forcing him onto a nearby stool. 

Hand on Tony’s shoulder, he leaned down to meet his eye. 

“Are you okay?” he asked seriously, but Tony just lifted his shirt and pulled out the arc reactor, watching as the palladium core popped up with a hiss. “Is that supposed to be smoking?”

“If you must know, it’s neutron damage,” Tony leaned heavily on the table beside him. “Grab me that cigar box, would you?” 

Rhodey frowned but did as he was told, popping open the lid as he set it down beside Tony. 

“It’s palladium,” Tony explained as he tossed aside the used-up core and replaced it with a new one from the box. 

Rhodey picked up the discarded core, charred and rust-colored. “You’ve been putting this in your _body?_ ” he balked. 

Tony didn’t bother granting that a response, instead turning away so he could slide the arc reactor back in without having to show his face, sweaty and gasping, to a man who had seen him on the brink too many times not to recognize it. 

“It’s fine.”

“And the high-tech crossword puzzle on your neck?” Rhodey asked. 

“New tattoo,” Tony responded flatly, despite what he knew was terror-tinged desperation in his eyes when he turned around. 

Rhodey just watched him, studied him with an unearned carefulness as Tony pushed himself up and stumbled back to his desk.

“You know, you have this whole lone gunslinger act,” Rhodey spoke up. “And it’s as unnecessary as it is annoying.”

“I brought a kid into my mess and he messed up _once_ and I screamed in his face, Rhodey,” Tony spat, because even recalling the memory put a bitter taste in his mouth, let alone recounting it aloud. “That’s my legacy. That’s what I’m leaving behind.” 

“Why wouldn’t you call me for something like this?” Rhodey asked, and Tony knew that he was talking more about the obvious mental breakdown than the kid he’d fired. He meant the collapsing too-- the smoking gun inside his chest. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

“I need you to trust me,” Tony implored. 

“Who is this guy anyway?” Rhodey leaned back on Tony’s desk so he could look him in the face. “This intern?” 

“He was helping me with a bit of a problem I’ve been having.”

“With the palladium?” Rhodey questioned knowingly. “You know you aren’t the only one that went to MIT around here, right? I can help you with this shit.” 

“Not if I’m trying to protect you from this shit, you can’t,” Tony fired back weakly. “Contrary to popular belief I have reasons for doing the things that I do.” 

Rhodey clenched his jaw, defensive and worried as he crossed his arms and looked down at Tony’s slumped shoulders with a look that asked _good ones?_

“Can I tell Pepper about this?” he asked, relenting. “Can I do that one thing for you?”

Tony inhaled deeply, let it out. 

“No.” 

***

Realistically, it was lucky that they had been using Peter’s designs to build their Hammer drones-- the page they’d managed to get off of him had been of work he’d done before he got his hands on the real thing, so they were far from perfect and even entirely faulty in some regards. 

The guns, for example, weren’t something that Peter had even a sliver of experience with, and were thus not in working order quite yet. And the remote manning-- that was something Justin was oddly insistent upon but that no one had figured out. 

With a little time, Peter knew that he could get the drones in working order, but the problem was that he very much did not want to. 

“What’re you trying to accomplish with these?” Peter asked, standing at the top of a ladder beside one of the prototypes and holding a helmet that wasn’t really a helmet so he could study the wiring at the neck. 

“Ultimately, I want them to put me in the Pentagon,” Hammer said, and Peter wondered briefly why this guy was being so fucking honest. 

Did he genuinely believe that Peter was on his side? That Peter Parker, the nerd from Queens, was working at Stark Industries-- the company that had spent the past two years removing itself from weapons tech as entirely as it possibly could have-- because he wanted to produce _more_ of this stuff? 

It only made sense when Peter realized he wasn’t Spider-Man in this moment. He was Peter Parker, and Peter Parker’s weaknesses were easily discovered. 

His blood went cold. They had something on him. 

“I want to make Iron Man look like an antique,” Justin was still saying as Peter put back the helmet and came back down the ladder, trying to remain impassive and strong and unflappable but combusting from the inside out as he wondered when the threat was going to come. “I want to go to Stark Expo and take a dump in Tony’s front yard. You know what I mean?”

“And you want me to help you do it,” he said, not a question. 

“I think we could make a great team, Peter Parker,” Justin smiled that same terrible smile. 

Peter chewed on his next words. “And if I don’t want to be on your team?” 

Justin rocked his head back and forth as though contemplating this-- all light-hearted and bright and terrifying. 

“Well, let’s put it this way,” he said. “You help us finish these, and we’ll let you go home to see your sweet aunt.”

Even knowing it was coming, Peter felt bile at the back of his throat. He was frozen, standing before an army of drones, and he knew he was running low on options. 

“May’s her name, right?” Justin asked knowingly. “I always did love school teachers-- such an underappreciated profession, y’know?” 

“Yeah,” Peter exhaled, knowing he could make one of two moves at that moment. 

One, he could say screw his identity, go full spider and try to make his way out of that place while facing up against weapons of his own design even though he couldn’t be sure that they didn’t have people waiting on standby right outside May’s apartment ready to hurt her; or two, he could be a little bit smarter about it. 

“So, we got a team name or what?” he smiled at Justin, and decided to use his head. 

***

Peter did what was asked of him, to the best and worst of his ability, and because of that he was graciously allowed to be escorted home in that same van each night and have his phone tapped. 

Justin was very adamant that nobody find out about their little surprise for Tony Stark, but he had also spent enough time looking into Peter’s life that he knew more than a day missing would bring a lot of very vocal people searching a little too close to home. Plus, it seemed that Peter’s poker face was actually something to be reckoned with, considering how convinced Justin seemed to be that they were on the same team.

So Peter had to act normal, and he had to try not to freak out his friends, and when they asked him why he was so jittery he had to pretend like he was really just _that_ fucked up about the fight he’d had with Tony because if they knew they would be in danger, if they knew they would get hurt and it would be his fault and his fault only. 

And Peter couldn’t handle that. 

So he did what was asked of him, and he made sure no one was watching when he tucked a little fail safe into a red and blue wire at the base of each drone’s neck. 

***

_Blood Toxicity: 80 percent._

“Miss Rushman?”

“Yes?”

“If it was your last birthday, and you knew it was your last birthday, how would you spend it?”

“I would do whatever I wanted. With whoever I wanted.” 

***

Tony Stark was having a birthday party back in Malibu and it was trending on Twitter. 

Well, one video in particular was trending on Twitter and Peter had managed to watch it about four times on a loop using Michelle’s phone before the woman herself sat down next to him on the couch and pinched his chin between two fingers so she could turn his gaze to face her. 

“This is pathetic.”

“Me or him?” Peter smiled in a sad, self-deprecating way. 

“Both to varying degrees,” Michelle replied honestly. 

Peter sighed and let his head fall to her lap, phone face down on his chest. 

“Something huge is about to happen,” Peter said, quietly and with enough sincere fear that he knew she could hear it. “Something huge is about to happen and he’s off in California doing _this_ , Em.”

Michelle seemed to consider this, chewed on a thought for a beat, and decided not to call him directly out on the fact that he was hiding something from her. They both knew it, and they both also knew there was very little point in arguing about it. 

“You’ve never needed backup before,” she said. “Well, not more backup than me and Ned.” 

“Yeah.”

“Is this just a crisis of confidence?” Michelle asked gently. “Or is there something going on that I need to know about-- that I need to worry about.” 

“I just thought…” he made a disgruntled sound. “I dunno.”

One of Michelle’s hands landed gently against his forehead, pushing away stray curls in such a way that made Peter’s heart feel not quite one with the rest of his body, dancing its own jittery dance somewhere just outside his chest. 

That on top of all the other anxiety made him wonder if he was genetically prone to heart attacks. His parents and Ben had all died too young for him to know. 

“You thought,” Michelle said quietly, cutting into his mental tirade with steady earnestness. “That maybe you weren’t going to be the only one of your kind anymore.” 

And he hated how well she could read him but loved it all the same, because that was exactly what he had been grasping for, even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself yet. 

Spider-Man was a lonely guy. Yeah, his life was exciting and he genuinely wanted to do good for the people of his city, but as much criticism and support he got in equal measure, all of it was coming from someone who would never get it. 

They would never get what it was like to stumble upon an opportunity to help and feel so intrinsically linked to the desire to _use it_ that it became a whole separate entity inside your head. They would never get the pride of saving someone or the guilt of not. 

They would never get what it was like to make a decision in a scenario where there were no ideal outcomes. Because sometimes there were no ideal outcomes, because sometimes you had to create a larger mess and clean it up later because that was the only option. 

No one else got it, this thing spiralling in Peter’s head. 

But Iron Man could have. Maybe. In another universe. 

***

Rhodey took a suit and beat him up, but Tony figured he probably deserved it. 

He was wasted and he was mentally and emotionally wrecked and every time his fist came in contact with his best friend’s face he only felt worse about the state of his life, the name for himself he was leaving behind. 

With each passing day it felt more and more like there was some diseased part of him determined to make sure no one remembered him favorably. Not even James Rhodes, who had never been anything but a source of steadiness in Tony’s life, never been anything but a true and honest friend to the man who had been surrounded by fake ones for too many years. 

They blew up his Malibu house, and it was a pretty gross waste of resources, a major liability for the structural integrity of the cliffside they were on, and still Tony didn’t feel even the slightest amount of catharsis. 

A lot of self-hatred though. Always the self-hatred. 

***

Peter Parker was supposed to be on his way back to Hammer Industries where he was working for no pay to build weapons of mass destruction that he was completely morally opposed to because the mere idea of being the reason that his aunt got hurt was more than his big ole’ guilt complex could stomach. 

He was supposed to be, but instead he’d found himself living out a very boring spy thriller this morning-- note under the door, time and location in code, all stuff he recognized and didn’t really want to deal with at the moment. 

But then again, maybe these were some of the only people that could help him with his current predicament. 

“I can’t stay long, I’m being tailed.”

Booth, tucked away in a corner of the coffee shop where they were sitting, out of sight from any windows or doors. 

“I know you are,” Nick Fury said, ever with the bluntness. “Why else do you think you’d be here right now?”

Peter shrugged. “Because you’re still heartbroken that I don’t wanna join your band?” 

“This is entirely not about that, and you know it,” Fury gave him a stern look. “How’d you manage to convince Hammer you should be allowed to go on walkabouts, anyway?”

“I’m just really very likable,” Peter deadpanned, taking a long drink from too-hot coffee. 

“Sure,” he replied, and if Nick Fury had been the kind of guy to roll his eyes he would have been doing it in that moment. 

And then, as though from nowhere, someone else was standing by their table. 

“Tails are about to start getting restless, we should hurry up.” 

Peter did a full cartoonish whip of the head double take at the sight of Natalie Rushman, dressed in all black and definitely concealing more than one gun under that jacket of hers, because, because, because--

“I _knew_ you had something up your sleeve,” he pointed at her as she sat down next to Fury across from him. “I can’t prove that because I didn’t say it to anyone, but I thought it-- real loud inside my own head,” he tapped at his temple with the finger he had previously been using to point at her. 

Natalie just smirked at him, apparently amused, so at least he hadn’t lost that yet. 

“Peter, this is Agent Romanoff,” Fury said. 

“Shield?” Peter questioned. “Does Tony know…?”

“I’m sure he’ll find out soon enough,” Romanoff said. “But we have bigger issues at the moment.” 

Peter sobered, jaw clicking as he sat up straighter. 

“They’re threatening my aunt,” he said lowly. “I would’ve found a more aggressive way out of this already if I could’ve but they have eyes on her and I will not risk that. I won’t let you two risk that either.” 

“Kid, we know,” Fury said. 

“I’m not a _kid_ ,” Peter snapped, because he wasn’t and because he wasn’t sure why everyone was so insistent on calling him as such, before clicking his teeth together as he shut his mouth. He shook his head, “I only mean-- You’re not my boss and I’ll help you out if I can with this but not if it’s gonna put her in more danger.” 

“Hammer may have eyes on her, but so do we,” Romanoff said, an almost soothing sort of certainty in her voice that he knew was part of her training but let comfort him anyway. “We won’t let anything happen to your aunt.”

Peter let his eyes flit between the two of them, skeptical. 

“In return for what?” 

Fury looked almost impressed, although he always looked unnecessarily impressed when Peter proved once again that he wasn’t a mindless pawn. 

“We need you to be our guy inside this whole Hammer mess,” he explained. “He may say that he wants to be exclusively contracted with the US military, but…”

“You think he has other goals?” Peter asked. 

“It’s hard to know,” Fury said. “Which is why we need you to stay where you are, keep being his friend until we’re able to get you safely out of there.” 

Peter furrowed his brow. “You know I’m not a spy, right? I mean, people are already questioning what’s going on with me. I’m pretty sure May is convinced I’m either doing drugs or selling drugs.”

That much was true. He hadn’t been able to go see her as much as he would like with the hours he was working (and the people he was working for) and every time they _did_ talk, May very sincerely asked how he was doing, which she only did when she knew something was wrong.

“I am painfully aware of the fact that you are not a spy,” Fury deadpanned. “But, unfortunately for us, you’re what we’ve got at the moment.” 

Peter looked at Agent Romanoff, with her well-practiced impassiveness, and then back at Fury. He was pretending to consider it, although in reality he knew he didn’t really have a lot of choice in the matter. He’d gotten into this mess too deep already and now he was working for two competing organizations when he so entirely preferred the independence that Spider-Man offered. 

But then again, he wasn’t acting as Spider-Man at all at the moment, and he needed May to be kept safe, so he said, “Yeah. Yeah, whatever, just keep your word and we’ll be fine.” 

Fury nodded, appeased. 

“One more thing,” he said. “You’ve been helping Stark with his little health problem?”

Peter crossed his arms, sat back in his seat. 

“I was,” he admitted. “Not anymore.” 

“What? Why not?” Fury seemed put off by this, as though it was messing with his personal timeline. Yeah, Peter thought, same dude. 

“Difference of opinion,” Peter responded simply. 

“So he’s still sick?” Romanoff asked. “There’s no way he pulled that shit at his birthday party if he wasn’t still sick.” 

“We tried every combination, every permutation of every known element,” Peter told them, unable to keep some of the hurt out of his own voice, the frustration. “He’s a smart guy, and quite frankly so am I, and nothing. Nothing’s a suitable replacement for the damn palladium core.” 

Fury huffed out a breath, frustrated too but in a different way from Peter. 

“Really, why’d I think the guy would figure it out on his own,” he mumbled to himself. “Alright, Parker. Keep doing what you’re doing, we’ll keep eyes on your aunt to make sure she’s safe, and in the meantime… We’ve got another coffee date to make.”

***

Tony was hungover as hell and wearing what really wasn’t the most comfortable metal suit in the world in a donut shop and still none of that was the most surprising thing going on. 

Natalie Rushman was a Shield agent and her name wasn’t Natalie. 

Nick Fury was pissed at him (that one wasn’t surprising so much as irritating). 

They somehow had a better way of combatting his current symptoms than he did (both surprising _and_ irritating). 

And did he mention how _fucking_ hungover he was? 

“I’m sorry to have to let you down again, but I really don’t wanna join your boy band,” Tony said, eliciting an exasperated reaction from Fury beyond even what he usually got for some unknowable reason. 

Agent Romanoff just smirked. 

“I’m gonna cut to the chase,” Fury said. “Because quite frankly I’m tired of you people.”

“You talking to a lot of one-of-a-kind superheroes today?” Tony teased. 

“You’d be surprised,” Fury deadpanned before levelling Tony with a stern look. “You’ve tried every known element, correct?” he nodded to where circuit-board veins were peeking out from under his collar. 

Tony frowned. “An apt assumption.”

“Well,” a twinkle in his eye. “I’m here to tell you that you haven’t tried them all.” 

***

“Big news, kid!” Justin exclaimed joyously as he strode across the space towards where Peter was working. “Big, big, exciting news!”

Peter took a screwdriver out from between his teeth and cocked an eyebrow. 

“Yeah?” he questioned. “Sounds-- exciting.” 

“We’re going to the Expo!” Justin threw his hands up in the air and looked like he was just on the verge of jumping up and down he was so happy. 

Peter held onto his face for dear life, urging it not to fall, urging it not to do anything out of the ordinary. 

“Stark Expo?” he asked, clearing his throat. 

“We’re doing a presentation with the Air Force,” Justin told him. “Gonna have to go meet with them tomorrow, but I wanna get these things done by presentation day as well-- we really wanna show ‘em what we’ve got, right kid?”

“Right.”

A beat passed and Justin furrowed his brow at him. “Well… Get to it then.”

“Right, sorry,” Peter lifted his screwdriver up. “Getting to it.”

“Exciting!” Justin pumped a fist before turning around and walking away. 

Peter looked at the drone he was building. 

“Fuck.” 

***

“That thing in your chest is based on unfinished technology.”

“No,” Tony shook his head at Fury, a man he hadn’t begun the day expecting to share a plane ride back to New York with, but so things went. “It was finished, just not particularly effective until I miniaturized it and…”

Fury shook his head this time, forcing Tony to trail off in confusion. 

“Howard said that the arc reactor was a stepping stone to something greater,” he explained. “He was about to kick off an energy race that was gonna _dwarf_ the arms race. He was onto something big. Something so big, that it was gonna make the nuclear reactor look like a triple-A battery.” 

“Okay, that’s all well and good,” Tony leaned back in his seat across from Fury, letting the light from the window create shapes across his chest. “But what do you mean when you say I haven’t tried everything?” 

“Your dad said,” Fury continued. “That _you_ were the only guy with the means and knowledge to finish this thing he started.” 

_Even from beyond the veil._

“He said that?” Tony replied-- flat and disbelieving. 

“Are you that guy?” Fury said with a lilt to his tone, knowing that he was ignoring Tony’s question, knowing that even still the claim was working in his favor whether it was true or not. “Because if you are, you can fix this.” 

Tony, one leg tucked underneath him and one foot tapping against the floor of the jet, let his eyes fall shut for a moment, took a deep breath of recycled airplane air. 

“I don’t know where you get your information,” he shook his head with a huff of nearly-amused breath. “But what a story, if it’s true.” 

The man that Tony remembered, the one who was happier with his kid off at boarding school than at home where he could make a mess of things; the one who was either too busy or too cold to remind his own son that he liked him so much as loved him; the one who quite simply, didn’t see a boy worth much of anything in Tony-- that man was different from the one Fury was describing. 

That man would have told Tony to give up on his grapple with life months earlier than he actually had, because that man never would’ve thought Tony was capable of taking a piece of Howard Stark technology and making it somehow _better._

But here was Nick Fury, Tony thought, as they disembarked the jet and stepped out onto glimmering tarmac, telling him that his memory of his father was false in some way, and god, a part of Tony wanted him to be right. A part of Tony, looking death in the face the way that he was, felt all of ten years old, and he really just wanted his dad to fucking save him. 

“I’ve got lots of good, _true_ , stories about your dad if you ever wanna hear ‘em,” Fury said with a tilt of his head that looked a lot like shrugging if he was the kind of guy that shrugged. 

“What?”

“Yeah. He was a founding member of Shield, after all.”

_“What?”_

A car with tinted windows pulled up in front of them as suitcases were unloaded beside them and Tony was reeling. What a way to tell a guy that--

“That’s for you,” Fury nodded to one of the cases as he grabbed his own bag. “You can handle that, right?”

“Handle what?” Tony asked, for the third time, staring at the big silver case with its heavy-duty locks and literal red tape. “I don’t know what’s going on here.”

“I’ve got people to see, but I’ll catch you later, Stark,” Fury said over his shoulder as he strode towards the car and pulled open the door. 

“Wait, wait, wait,” Tony called out after him. “What the hell are you up to, Fury?” 

“Agent Romanoff will keep her post at SI,” he responded. “We’ll be in touch.”

And then he was gone, and Happy was pulling up, and Tony was just standing there-- broken and vulnerable and confused with a big silver case and no answers. 

***

James Rhodes was a man who knew how to follow orders. He was a military man after all, so it was in his blood, it was hardwired into his brain, it was right there sitting on the tip of his tongue every time he said _Yes, Sir._

But right now, he was following orders, and although it wasn’t the first time he felt apprehensive about said orders, it was the most gut wrenching it had felt in a good long while. 

“Oh, yes!” Justin Hammer exclaimed with all the obnoxious bravado of a man who hadn’t earned it as he entered the hangar where they had laid out the technically stolen silver Iron Man armor. “Yes, yes, yes! It’s like it’s my birthday!”

Someone behind him was pushing in a large cart of pelican cases, but Rhodey kept his stern gaze on the guy out front, the one that was making him feel all torn up about the orders he’d been given. 

“You got one,” Justin beamed at him from across the suit when he came to a halt. “What’d you do to get one? Look at you!”

Rhodey had committed a minor act of betrayal and a major act of property destruction. 

Instead he said, “Hammer. I wanna know what you plan to do for us, here.” 

“What am I going to do for you?” Hammer was positively giddy, smug with it all. “We talking software upgrades? We talking--”

“We’re talking firepower,” Rhodey cut him off, and Hammer smirked. 

“Yes, we are,” he said. “Peter-- Where are my manners, Peter come here,” he motioned broadly for the someone who had dragged the cart in to step forward. “This is my good friend, Peter Parker. He’s been helping me out with some new designs lately.”

Hammer’s good friend Peter Parker, now that Rhodey was looking at him, seemed to be actual jailbait. Straight out of high school, if that. 

“Colonel,” Peter nodded, polite in all but posture with his shoulders hunched up close to his ears and his hands in the pockets of his jeans. 

Rhodey nodded back, wondering if maybe he wasn’t the only one not entirely on board with the current state of affairs. 

“Let’s show these gentlemen what we have to offer, huh?” Justin clapped Peter on the shoulder, and then it was a slew of guns and missiles and assault rifles that Rhodey was pretty sure the kid had never held in his life if the uncomfortable look on his face meant anything.

It reminded him of Basic, of the varying degrees of _into it_ that had popped up during weapons training. From the guys that were there for that express purpose, because they thought it was cool, thought it would make them badass to shoot someone on the battlefield; all the way to the guys that could barely even touch the things, the guys like Justin’s good friend Peter Parker who most certainly hadn’t signed up to live out the glory of war, but more likely because they didn’t have any other options. 

Rhodey took every piece of weaponry that they offered him. Because he knew how to follow orders. 


	5. Peter Parker Goes to a Party

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the penultimate! <3

The big silver case with the heavy-duty locks was also labeled with capital bold letters. 

_PROPERTY OF H. STARK_

For most of his youth, Tony had found everything to be easier when he expressly avoided anything and everything that belonged to H. Stark, because _don’t touch that, you’ll break it_ and _get out of here, I’m busy_ and _this isn’t a game, Anthony, it’s serious work!_

But here he was, a grown adult with his own lab that he could lock people out of indiscriminately and a big silver case that no one could stop him from touching. 

So he opened it. 

Blueprints. Photographs. Journals. Reels of film safely kept in their canisters. 

The specs for the arc reactor were in there, rolled up carefully alongside a few stray newspaper clippings, but at a first glance they didn’t hold any information that Tony wasn’t already painfully aware of. 

Out of all of it, Tony wasn’t sure why he was drawn to the Kodak reels, why the urge was so insistent that he took the time to pull out a projector from one of the storage rooms a few floors down and cart it back up to his own lab. Dying was doing something strange to him, he supposed, as he realized that despite everything a part of him still missed his father. 

The whir of the projector as the film spun through was familiar, almost soothing, but the sight of a familiar shot, _Expo Intro_ as it was slated, wasn’t quite that. 

_“Everything is achievable through technology,”_ the ghost of his father told him. _“Better living, better health, and for the first time in human history-- the possibility of world peace.”_

Tony flipped through one of Howard’s journals as he half-listened. Strings of failed equations and notes on notes on notes. It was a new experience, to see his father fumbling his way through something, even if only in writing. 

_“I’m Howard Stark,”_ the film continued as Tony pulled out his phone and tapped out some numbers of his own, a modified version of the pages in front of him. _“And everything you’ll need for the future can be found right here.”_

And that’s where the clip they’d played at the new Expo-- Tony’s Expo-- deviated from the one he was watching. Because this was raw footage, uncut with all of Howard’s mistakes on display. He walked back and took the line again, he changed the wording around, he mumbled corrections to himself under his breath and talked to the man behind the camera about framing. 

Tony continued to number crunch and Howard continued to grasp for the right word choice and Tony had basically tuned him out entirely when--

_“Tony, what are you doing back there?”_

Tony’s head shot up at the sound of his name spoken with the voice of that man to see a much younger version of himself on screen-- barely a boy let alone the man he’d become. 

He watched himself get reprimanded, and he watched himself be dragged out of the room, and he watched his father tell the cameras to cut so they could scrap that and start again. 

And then the reel came to an end and he had to reach over to stop the projector so the end of the film would stop making that flapping sound as it continued to spin off without intervention. 

Howard’s notes were incomplete. 

Tony dragged himself out of the room. 

***

“Californium… Carbon… Cerium…” Peter mumbled to himself, elbow deep in the chest of one of the drones. “Cesium… Chlorine… Chromium… Fuckium… Goddamnium… Jesus Christ-ium…”

He really wished he could worry about the one life threatening endeavor on his docket, but the way his brain worked simply wouldn’t allow it. Peter kept cycling through the elements, their properties, their atomic mass-- basically everything he could conjure off the top of his head-- and still none of them worked. 

“Fluorine… Francium… Gadolini--”

“Who’re you talking to up there?” Justin called up the ladder to Peter, who had known he was coming from a mile away but startled at the sound of his voice nonetheless. 

“Um. Myself?” Peter replied honestly. 

Justin laughed. “It really is almost like having a miniature Stark around-- the crazy and all.”

Peter bristled at that, but still laughed as believably as he could because he had already decided that he would never be a spy again, ideally never work with Shield again, so he was going to be very good at in and then quit because he was _too good_ and not because he couldn’t take the heat. 

He hadn’t met up with Fury or Romanoff in the week since he’d last seen them, but messages had been mysteriously appearing in his apartment and when he wrote up answers to them before leaving in the morning, they were gone when he got home. 

Apparently, it was all meant to be over soon, and Peter had been hoping that soon meant within the next twelve hours, but he had a feeling it didn’t. 

“What’s our status?” Justin asked. “We gonna be ready for tomorrow night?”

“Yes, Sir,” Peter said. 

“Because we’ve got a big show to put on,” Justin said, still in that faux-casual way he always spoke, but with a slightly more warning tone than usual. “I want fireworks, right?”

“No problem.” 

“Good kid,” Justin pointed at him with a big grin on his face. “Keep it up and maybe we’ll let you fly one of these things one day.” 

Peter could not wait to no longer be a spy. 

***

“I’m allergic to strawberries, Tony.”

“You’re allergic to strawberries,” he reiterated, sat in the seat across from her desk in her New York office which had once been his New York office. “Okay. See, what happened here is that I remembered strawberries were significant in some way and just-- got it twisted. But the intent-- Come on, the intent, right?”

“Do you actually need something from me?” she crossed her arms, posture telling him exactly what level of pissed she still was about his birthday and the shitshow that _that_ was. “Because I don’t know if you know this, but I’m trying to run a company here--”

“I do know that--”

“And it’s a lot of goddamn work, Tony--”

“Which you are doing a lovely job at managing--”

“I swear to God, if you don’t stop talking I might actually throttle you,” she said, full of a frustration that was, once again, his fault. 

“Sure thing,” he agreed readily, but also out loud which earned him quite the look from beneath Pepper’s eyebrows. 

“Can we call this what it is?” she asked flatly. “Because you’re having some sort of breakdown, Tony. You know it and and I know it and God knows Rhodey knows it considering you spent your birthday party firing laser beams at him--”

“It’s not a breakdown--”

“ _Throttle you,”_ she emphasized. “We all know that something is going on here, but you, Mister Stark, are the only one who knows what it is and why it’s happening. So you either need to tell me, so I can help you, or you need to figure it out. Because I am tired of cleaning up messes that I don’t understand.” 

The problem was, Tony wanted so badly to tell her how much he needed her. He needed her an impossible amount, because it had always been her, in more ways than one and he was just too stunted and too scared to ever have done anything about it. 

He opened his mouth and he wasn’t sure what he was going to say, it may have even been the truth, but then the door to Pepper’s office opened and his new friend the super spy poked her head in. 

“Miss Potts, someone is here to see you,” not-Natalie said without looking at Tony, although he did hope she could feel the glare he was sending her direction. “Oh, she’s, um--”

“Tony Stark, you need to get your act together.”

The someone in question was in fact a young woman, all curly hair and knock-off Doc Martens and a lack of respect for authority. 

“Do I?” he questioned, faint amusement coloring his tone because he was trying to figure out if this new person had barged past the Shield agent or if the Shield agent had _allowed_ this person to barge in. 

“I’m sorry,” Pepper frowned. “Who are you?” 

“I’m a friend of Peter Parker’s,” she said without giving her name. Tony felt something in him drop at the mention of the kid, though. “And I need you to tell me what he was working on for you,” she looked pointedly at Tony. 

“Yeah, sure,” Tony snorted. “Want any of my patents while we’re at it?” 

“Something big is going on and it’s not good,” she ignored his glibness, holding her ground steadily in a way only one other person her age had ever managed. “And Peter’s not telling me what it is because on top of being overprotective and stubborn he also has about as much self-preservation as you,” she motioned at Tony broadly. “But it started when he started working in your lab. So I need you to tell me.” 

And Tony wasn’t always observant when it came to new people, because his brain was usually too busy filtering through other things to commit names and faces to memory, but she had said _Peter Parker_ and she had implied trouble so when a crack of something less certain showed through on her face, something more like fear, he noticed it. And it made his stomach flip. 

“Okay,” Pepper shook her head, flustered without showing it but flustered still. “Natalie, would you see Miss… Would you see our guest out, please? This is-- a lot. And I have to make seven hundred more phone calls this afternoon.”

“Yes, Miss Potts--”

“Nope, you know what, that’s alright,” Tony sprang out of his chair and began his path across the room. “I can show Peter Parker’s friend the door-- I’m heading that way myself, actually.” 

“Tony--”

“This is one of those problems that I created,” he looked to Pepper imploringly. “And I am-- I am figuring it out, right here before your eyes, huh?” 

Pepper sighed heavily, and Peter’s nameless friend looked between them curiously, like she was observing them rather than a playing member of the current conversation. 

“We’re gonna talk more later,” Pepper told him, and Tony nodded, giving her a smile that he hoped said whatever it was she needed to hear from him, because his mouth certainly wasn’t.

He clapped his hands together. “Come on then, Peter Parker’s friend, let’s go.”

When she followed him, it was with a shared, knowing glance, so he knew she was aware that they weren’t quite done yet. 

***

“You’re not taking me to some secret underground prison are you?” she asked in the elevator, deadpanned enough that he didn’t think she was serious but he couldn’t be positive. “I’ve always wanted to know if Iron Man has an iron maiden.”

Tony laughed, a surprised burst of a thing. “Only on vinyl,” he said. 

The sound she made sounded almost like approval, but he wasn’t counting his chickens.

***

“Give me the low-down,” Tony said, taking note of the fact that even this generally unfazed kid was impressed by the sprawl of his lab, eyes raking across the space and almost visibly making notes. 

“He’s been working insane hours for weeks-- but you fired him before that started,” she explained, watching him pace around between holograms but standing still where she was near the entrance. He wasn’t going to call her out for sticking near her escape route, though. He got the urge better than most people, after all. 

“So, he got a new job,” Tony countered. 

“Yeah, but he tells me everything,” she said. “And he’s skirting around this like it’s fucking radioactive.” 

“Okay, kid--”

“Don’t call me kid.”

Tony cocked his head to the side at her, impressed at the utter lack of intimidation between the two of them. It didn’t happen often, especially not within twenty minutes of meeting someone. 

“You got a name I can call you?”

She hesitated, chewed on it, and then: “Michelle.” 

“Okay, Michelle,” he nodded. “When you say something big is going on…?”

“I mean that I think Peter has bitten off more than he can chew with something,” she said. “I just don’t know what yet.” 

Tony worked his jaw in contemplation. 

“My instinct is telling me to believe you,” he said. “Not sure why, but, good for you.” 

“It’s because I don’t give off the vibe that I care enough about you to lie to you,” she explained flatly. 

Tony actually laughed at that, a small sound at the back of his throat as he crossed his arms and looked her over. 

“Okay, well,” he said, walking past her and beginning to type at a computer. “Guess we better find out where our boy has been spending his days, huh?”

“You can do that?” Michelle followed him, seeming to get more comfortable, or at least too hopeful to care. “Track people?”

“Don’t tell the NSA,” Tony replied. “Really don’t wanna have to give them access to this tech.” 

Michelle nodded. “Word.” 

Tony kept at the typing and Michelle kept at the room examining, wandering over to a nearby table. 

“What is this?” she asked. 

Tony looked up from what he was doing just long enough to see the familiar miniaturized buildings and booths. 

“Model for the last Expo,” he said. “1974.”

“Why’s it look like that?” 

Tony actually turned around then so he could make a face at her. “What’s that mean? It’s a model, that’s what models look like.”

“No,” she looked at him like he was stupid. Maybe he was. “It’s all _round._ Like, the way they structured this thing to be the exact opposite of how the city is laid out.”

Tony studied her face for a moment, and then looked back at the table to study _it_. He saw her point. 

“New York is built on a grid,” she muttered to herself. “I feel like you’re just creating extra work for yourself with all these circles.” 

“Yeah,” he spoke slowly. There was something right at the edge of his brain, and he had to slow down for a minute as to not scare it off. “Yeah, you would be, wouldn’t you?”

“I mean, no offense,” Michelle said, unbothered by the way Tony was actively having an epiphany. “But I think your dad was a little overbearing to think he could impose circles onto the map of New York.” 

That was the kind of joke that Tony usually would’ve found funny, and usually would’ve had a prompt and witty retort to reply to with, but he was too busy walking over to her now, looking at the shape of the thing, at the little plaque on the side. 

_The key to the future is here._

“Jarvis, could you kindly Vac-U-Form a digital wire frame,” he said, watching as the blue frame began its path across the model. “I need a manipulatable projection.” 

“Did I distract you too much?” Michelle asked. “Is this helping us figure out what’s going on with Peter?” 

“Probably not,” Tony said. “Although, maybe. I don’t know. But gimme a minute anyway.” 

Michelle just leaned back against the workbench behind them and watched. 

She watched as he projected the scan in front of them, and she watched as he removed foot paths and food stands and restrooms from the map. 

“You sciency?” he asked her, as he tilted his head, stared at the layout before him. 

“I went to a STEM high school,” she informed him. 

“What’s that look like to you,” he motioned towards the projection. “Not entirely unlike an atom, right?”

Michelle tilted her head too then, and he would’ve thought she was mocking him if she didn’t have a certain sincerity to her. Plus, he figured she would just outright tell him if she was mocking him. 

“Nucleus in the middle?” she asked. “I don’t remember a ton about the structure of an atom, but that… I mean, it kinda looks like a nucleus.”

“That it does,” Tony nodded, wondering when he had started getting used to bouncing ideas off another human being rather than computer programs and robots that couldn’t talk. 

“What exactly is happening here?” Michelle asked. “Why does the Expo look like an atom?”

“I’m discovering-- Uh-- Rediscovering? A new element,” Tony told her, slightly distractedly as he continued to remove unwanted elements with quick waves of his hands. “I think I am, at least… Jarvis, structure the protons and neutrons using the pavilions as a framework.” 

“I’m sorry-- a new _element?”_ Michelle gaped at him. 

Tony ran a hand over his face, because yeah, he was pretty baffled by it too if he was being honest with himself. 

“How much did Peter tell you about what we’ve been working on?” he asked, watching as an atomic structure formed in the glowing blue, holographic image before them. 

“The arc reactor,” Michelle responded. “You were trying to fix it. Something about it is-- hurting you.” 

“Killing me, more accurately,” Tony said. “But this--” he snapped his fingers and the model spread out across the space, enveloping them in and amongst protons and neutrons alike. “--is what we’ve been missing.”

Michelle looked up, turned around, something like amazement on what had up until that point been a guarded countenance. Tony couldn’t blame her-- he felt it too after all. 

His father, dead for nearly twenty years by that point, and still taking him to school. Bastard could’ve written it down somewhere more concisely, though. That might’ve helped. 

“You, Miss Michelle,” Tony said, deciding not to get into any of that with this young woman who had been brave enough, cared about her friend enough to come knocking down his door. “Probably just saved my life.” 

She turned to look him dead in the eye, a little like she didn’t believe him and a lot like she couldn’t bear to. 

“Pete’s gonna flip,” she said. 

Tony chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “What d’you say to helping me track him down so we can tell him?” 

The beginnings of a smirk pulled at Michelle’s face. 

He took that as a yes. 

***

Tony Stark, as Michelle was quickly realizing, was really just a nerdy mechanic at the end of the day. 

She told him as such in between bouts of talking to himself while he built whatever it was that was going to make it so he could use the literal element she had just watched him discover, and meanwhile, she had been given full access to all of Jarvis’ tracking capabilities to try and nail down why Peter’s movements had been so weird and concerning lately. 

There had been sledge hammering and jackhammering and Tony was levelling off some big metal tube in the center of the lab and although Michelle barely understood any of the science behind what was going on, she was committing it to memory as well as she could. 

Peter was definitely going to be sorry he missed out on this. 

“Miss Michelle,” Jarvis spoke up, pulling her attention back to the screens in front of her-- the normal desktop ones, not the crazy holographic ones that Tony had been using earlier. “I have found something of an interesting pattern in Mister Parker’s movements over the past three weeks.”

“Hit me with it,” she responded, watching as a list of addresses ordered by the frequency with which Peter visited them appeared in front of her. One address, right there at the top of the list, had clocked in at a truly unreasonable number of hours, even more than he spent at home, or at May’s. “Weird…”

Michelle copied the address manually and pasted it into a search engine, because the whole AI thing was very cool but she wasn’t exactly accustomed to asking someone else to do something when she was perfectly capable of accomplishing it on her own. 

A few seconds passed as Google Maps loaded the address, Tony still talking to himself in the background as he sealed something inside the tube, and then-- 

“What the fuck?” 

Tony looked up at her. “Find something?”

“Jarvis, did I mess up the address?” she asked, checking back at the original list and comparing the two even as Jarvis told her that it was correct. “Fuck. Shit.”

In her heart she knew it was a Spider-Man thing, but in her heart she also knew that Peter hated being around large amounts of firepower. Even years later, even-- or especially-- after all the hands-on work he did as Spider-Man to reduce the number of guns in the city. 

“Hammer Industries?” Tony balked, suddenly looking over her shoulder. “Did he really get a new job that fast? And with Justin fucking Hammer of all people?”

“Peter would never work there,” Michelle said fiercely, standing up and striding over to where she had left her backpack. 

Tony was studying her with curiosity, she could feel it as she dug through her bag and pulled out her phone. 

“You’re very certain of that,” he said levelly. 

“Hammer manufactures weapons,” Michelle said, typing in a number on her cell.

“So did I,” Tony told her. “For a long time.”

“The only reason he has so much respect for you is because you stopped,” Michelle snapped, lifting the already ringing phone to her ear. “Peter Parker hates guns, he wouldn’t… Jarvis put us on speaker when he answers.”

“Of course, Miss Michelle.” 

Tony studied her some more, tried to get a read on her. She wasn’t sure how successful he was being, because all of her walls were crumbling under the sense that something was very, very wrong. 

Ring. 

Ring. 

Click. 

“Em?”

“What’re you up to right now?” Michelle asked. 

A clattering noise on the other end of the phone, a muttered curse. 

“What’s that?” Peter asked. “Do you need me for something, or…”

“Peter--”

“Hey, listen,” Peter’s voice was uncertain in a way it shouldn’t have been. “I gotta call you back, okay? I’ll talk to you later--”

“ _Parker--”_

Click. 

Michelle looked up at Tony as if to say _see?_

“Yeah, alright that was a little weird,” he said. “I’ll give you that.” 

Phone tucked in pocket, Michelle slung her backpack over one shoulder and began to head towards the door. 

“You’ve got this other stuff handled, right?” she asked. “You’re not gonna blow up the place with that thing?” she motioned to the contraption that she still didn’t understand the purpose of outside of vague element formation. 

Tony scoffed. “I’m Tony Stark.”

“Sure.”

“What’s _your_ plan?” he fired back. 

“I’m going to fill Ned in on all of… this,” she waved a hand at the room at large. “And then we’ll see you tonight.” 

“Tonight?”

“We have tickets to the Expo tonight,” she explained. “There’s no way Peter will miss that-- especially if he’s been investigating Hammer.” 

“I can’t babysit you, y’know,” Tony told her. “I do have things other than a bunch of teenagers who don’t know how to mind their own business to worry about.”

“Maybe,” she smirked. “But you’re invested now.”

Michelle turned on her heel and waved over her shoulder. 

“See you later, Stark!” 

She faintly heard Tony say something to Jarvis as the door slid shut behind her. Something like-- _lab’s becoming a fucking daycare._

Being a friend of Spider-Man had always been eventful, but this day had been a whole new level of strange. 

***

Peter had helped load up all of the drones onto a truck, but then he made his own way to the Expo. Apparently his talents weren’t needed for the presentation itself, but fuck if he wasn’t going to be there to keep an eye on the situation. 

His danger sense had been angry with him and his decision making skills for weeks, and so he hadn’t been sleeping and he’d been getting more and more jittery, but he had to be present for this thing. He had to see it to the end. 

Peter kept his eyes peeled for Fury or Romanoff once he was inside the event, wanting to check in with them, wanting to tell them he was done. He’d handed over plenty of useful information, after all-- or at least he felt like he had-- so he didn’t see why this had to continue. Except that he did, because there was still that threat hanging over him, because his life could never be even remotely cut-and-dry. 

Big groups of people were making their way to the main stage as Peter slipped through them, scowling at the “In Defense of Peace” signs featuring Hammer’s face set up on the sides of the stage. 

And then there was a hand on his bicep. 

“Mister Parker,” Natalie Rushman-- because she was definitely Natalie Rushman at the moment-- said breezily as she began to drag him away from the crowd. “Come with me for a moment.” 

“Dude,” Peter hissed as he stumbled after her, only stopping when they’d reached a relatively empty corridor just off the main pavilion. “ _Dude.”_

“We’re pulling you out of Hammer Industries,” she said and Peter almost collapsed against the wall with relief. 

“Oh, thank _God,”_ he breathed. “Are you bringing him in for something? Shutting him down? Do we even have to watch this stupid fucking presentation, because I would really rather bite off my own di--”

“The presentation is still happening, we’re bringing him in after,” she cut him off. 

“What did you get on him? Was I even any help?” 

“You were all-around almost no help at all,” she deadpanned. 

“I’m-- I was--” Peter sputtered. “I’m a highly experienced viglan--”

“ _Parker!”_

He whipped around, catching sight of a determined looking Michelle with an anxious looking Ned right on her heels as they hurried down the hallway towards him and his super-spy friend. 

“Hi?” he furrowed his brow at them. “What’re you doing here?” 

“Expo,” Ned pointed over his shoulder in a stilted but simple explanation of fact.

“Sorry, Mister Parker,” Natalie was back with her customer-service smile. “I should be on my way,” she waved politely to the others and quickly hurried back the way they had come. 

Ned made a face at Peter. “Who was _that?”_

“That was-- uh-- Miss Rushman,” Peter said. “I know her from SI.”

“She’s Miss Potts’ assistant,” Michelle said, which just made Peter even more confused when compounded with the non-conversation he had just had before they barged in. 

“I’m not gonna ask how you know that,” he said flatly. 

“Cool,” Michelle replied. “But I _am_ gonna ask what the hell you’ve been doing at Hammer Industries.” 

Peter gaped at her just as sound from the main stage boomed out of the speakers all across the pavilion. 

_“...welcoming CEO of Hammer Industries… Justin Hammer!”_

“Oh, hey!” Peter pointed in that direction beginning to walk away. “Let’s go check that out, huh? Bet that’ll be interesting.” 

“You’re not getting out of this,” Michelle crossed her arms over her chest but followed him nonetheless. 

Ned trudged behind them, muttering something about being _so fucking lost_ as they found their way through the crowd. 

***

Pepper didn’t like the guy-- did she have to pretend to like the guy?

She honestly wasn’t even sure why she had given him this slot at the Expo, other than she didn’t really have a good enough reason _not_ to give him this slot. The whole point was to open up chances for industry professionals the world over to find mutual opportunity for innovation, so she couldn’t really turn away a guy who was building an empire in their own backyard, could she?

Maybe she should have, she thought, as he danced out onto the stage, as he made subtle jabs at Iron Man and not so subtle brags about himself. 

The Expo may have been something of an exercise in narcissism, but Justin Hammer’s performance was an exercise in exhibitionism. Pepper was half convinced he got off on this shit. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he was saying on stage. “May I introduce to you the new face of the US Military: the Hammer Drone!” 

***

Peter stopped dead in his tracks as he watched the stage open up and a whole fleet of drones rise up-- imposing and massive and hopefully ready to fail at the click of a button. He thumbed at a small remote buried deep in his pocket and clenched his jaw tight enough to hurt a little bit. 

“Dude, what’s going on,” Ned spoke up from beside him, a little nervous and a little nonplussed. 

“It’s… I don’t know,” Peter replied tersely. 

“Is the danger sense going off because there are a shitload of guns onstage?” Michelle asked quietly. “Or is it for some other reason?” 

Shifting restlessly on the balls of his feet, one hand in pocket and one running through his hair and making it stick up on end, Peter turned to look at the two of them abruptly, knowing his face wasn’t hiding his fear. 

“I think I fucked up,” he said. “My intentions were good, but I think I fucked up.” 

“Explain,” Michelle demanded. God he appreciated her ability to get right to the point-- sure, he knew they’d be discussing this at length later, but at the moment she was able to read the immediacy of the situation and was willing to just get to the root of it without asking too many questions beyond the necessary. 

“I built those,” he pointed at the stage. 

“ _What--”_

“I built those _because he was threatening May,”_ Peter hissed over Ned’s indignation. “And I think I can take them out if necessary,” he pulled the remote out of his pocket and showed it to them. “But I couldn’t exactly test the failsafe so-- Uh-- flying blind here a little bit.”

“Jesus Christ,” Michelle muttered. 

“You think those things are gonna do something _tonight?_ ” Ned asked. 

“I have no idea!” Peter threw his hands up and let them fall. “Because no one fucking tells me anything and just expects me to go along with whatever they say because I’m some sort of child who hasn’t been doing this for three years _apparently--”_

“Peter. Take a breath,” Michelle cut off his tirade. “What do you need?” 

A beat. A shaky breath. A moment of steady eye contact before he nodded. 

“Get out of here,” he told them. 

“No,” Ned said. 

“I need you to go to May’s and stay there,” Peter fought back fiercely. “Because my head is going crazy right now, and it might just be my whole gun paranoia bullshit, but I really don’t think it is. Shield is almost definitely here and I’m not fucking around and letting you two get hurt just because super spies won’t leave me alone lately.” 

“Peter, if something is happening here--”

“This is super not a debate,” Peter cut her off. “This is-- This is…” he trailed off as he caught part of what Justin was saying on stage. 

Something about Colonel Rhodes. 

Something he hadn’t known was supposed to be part of this demonstration. 

“Okay,” he said, as the War Machine armor that Peter had known was meant to be eventually weaponized, but not with this much immediacy rose out of the floor. “ _That_ I did not do.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (okay i /know/ that the expo was in a park and that's why it looked like that in the desktop model but howard stark also thought the most secure place to keep his discovery of a new element was in a /desktop model/ so we're just suspending disbelief okay thanks)
> 
> thank you for stopping by! <3


	6. Peter Parker Gets with the Program

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to say thank you all for hanging out with me on this self-indulgent journey, I've had a blast. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this little conclusion <3

The new core was glowing a bright blue as he held it delicately between a set of tongs. Tony was careful, oh so careful, as he dropped it into a new arc reactor-- a design that he and Peter had actually been working on before whatever happened there had happened.

“It would be prudent to run a few tests on this new core before putting it to use,” Jarvis said, but Tony didn’t respond. He was too busy trying to keep his hands steady.

It took another minute or so, but eventually the new element slid in with ease, as if the two parts had been built with each other in mind, and Tony released a breath.

“How’s it look, Jay?”

A beat of quiet passed during which Tony admired his own handiwork. The lab was a mess, sure, but this new piece of tech, this first _fully completed_ arc reactor was something of a masterpiece if the master did say so himself.

“Jay?”

“Sir,” Jarvis said. “There appears to be something happening at the Expo that I believe you’ll want to see.”

“If it’s just Hammer’s mole face on my stage, I really would rather not,” Tony said, picking up the now completed arc reactor and admiring his work.

“No, Sir,” Jarvis continued. “This seems to be something going on remotely. My servers within the main pavilion are… facing difficulties.”

Tony fought the urge to throw something, or get himself a drink, or both.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered. “Someone’s hacking the Expo now? This is just getting embarrassing. What are they going for? Changing the signs to say _Stank Expo_ or something?”

“I believe this may be slightly more insidious than that.”

This was not how his day was supposed to go. He had just discovered a new element! He was about to run tests on a new reactor so he could slide it into his chest with full confidence that it was going to fix his little problem with death and dying!

He was not-- repeat, _not--_ supposed to be facing insidious hackers.

Tony groaned. “Insidious in what way, exactly?”

“Hammer Industries is currently revealing a new line of drones on the main stage,” Jarvis explained. “These drones function on a wireless network within the building, and _that_ network appears to be under attack by an unknown entity.”

Tony froze. “Drones?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Let me guess-- fully weaponized?”

“It would appear so.”

“Trapped in a pavilion with hundreds of civilians?”

“Approximately 1,725 civilians, Sir.”

Tony looked at the new arc reactor for all of a second and a half before letting out a tired _might as well_ and sliding the thing into his chest untested with a swivel and a click.

He gasped with the force of it for a moment, clapping a hand right above his heart a couple of times, and then--

“ _Whoo!_ That’s got a fuckin’ _kick,_ Jay.”

“I suppose it would.”

Tony leaned over the workbench, caught his breath, and watched the dark veins sprouting out from his arc reactor begin to retreat slowly. He almost laughed at the sight of it, and probably would have if he wasn’t in such a hurry.

“Okay,” he pushed back up to standing straight. “Time to go to work.”

***

When Rhodey spotted Tony’s suit come flying into the open-air pavilion, his first thought was that he really, desperately hoped his best friend hadn’t been drinking.

His second thought was how much it sucked that that had to be his first thought, and his third thought was when he began wondering how exactly he was going to navigate this situation and all the possible, but equally humiliating paths it could take.

“Tony, I’m here on orders, let’s not do this now,” he begged under his breath as Tony landed beside him, waving to the crowd.

“We’ve got a problem,” Tony replied, low and even in such a way that pointed towards sobriety even if Rhodey didn’t entirely believe that was the case yet.

“There are civilians present.”

“I’m aware,” Tony replied. “That’s kinda part of the problem, Platypus.”

Hammer, for his part, was actually rolling with their new arrival relatively well, but Rhodey assumed that probably had very little to do with either of the men in suits and everything to do with how it made the audience louder.

Self-absorbed prick.

“We gotta get these people out of here,” Tony continued. “They’re in danger and I just need you to trust me for five minutes.”

“Tony--”

“Five minutes,” he implored. “Someone is actively hacking into the wireless network that all these live guns are on, and if they’re hacking onto _my_ wireless network they’re not exactly small fish.”

“Didn’t a kid hack into your private server, like, a couple of months ago?”

“Yeah, and I upped security by about five-hundred percent,” Tony said. “Whoever is doing this is way above Hammer.”

“You think he’s working for someone?” Rhodey felt himself falling back into Tony’s orbit, like he always did, like he always would. But the guy knew how to make a case for himself.

“I think we gotta get these people out of here before we find out,” he muttered before marching forward, straight up to Justin and demanding, “Tell me who you’re working for and tell me where to find them.”

“Working…?” Justin’s face morphed into one of confusion even as he tried to keep smiling for the crowd. “Man, what are you doing here?”

“You didn’t come up with this shit on your own, you’re not fooling anyone,” Tony replied. “Tell me who's in charge.”

Justin stammered, but before he could say anything, and before Tony could really properly threaten him into saying anything, one of the turrets on Rhodey’s shoulder lifted, swiveled, and pointed itself directly at Tony.

Rhodey’s heart stuttered in his chest as his HUD lit up, showing he was locked onto a target that he most certainly had not chosen. Tony turned to look away from Justin and Rhodey wondered for a moment what was going on behind the mask.

“That you?”

“Not me,” Rhodey shook his head. “Definitely not me. I can’t-- I can’t move. I’m locked up.”

His breath was coming fast because as much as he didn’t want to admit it out loud he was scared. This was a whole new level of following his fucking orders and he was not a fan.

“Get outta here, Tones,” he shouted, just as he heard the drones behind him begin to follow his lead and arm themselves. “System’s compromised-- Get outta here!”

Tony engaged his repulsors and lifted off the ground without a second thought.

“Sure thing,” he said. “Let’s take it outside.”

***

Peter watched in horror as the drones lifted their weapons and began to fire at a retreating Iron Man, ears ringing with the sounds of screams and senses itching with the need to _do something about it._

He shoved at Michelle and Ned’s shoulders, pushing them into the flow of the racing crowd and yelling at them to _get outta here!_ despite their protests before he turned on his heel and ran behind a nearby booth. He knew the flow of traffic would force them out of the pavilion, even if they tried to fight it, and that at least was something.

Peter Parker was a master of the quick change, and he put this skill to use, crouching behind a big display banner as he pulled on his suit and mask.

And then he was swinging above the crowd, right into the firefight, and clutching at a little remote in one of his hands. Iron Man and the War Machine crashed through the overhang of the pavilion and glass shattered down over the heads of everyone trying to escape through bottle-necking exits. Peter latched a web onto a nearby support beam and made his way towards the stage.

Because he figured Tony probably had the air covered, but there was still an entire fleet of drones that were just beginning to step off the stage and towards all of the innocent people that Peter very much did not want to be responsible for hurting

The remote he had designed was meant to work like this.

It was meant to automatically connect to the same wireless network that the drones were being manned from when it was brought within ten feet of them, and it was _meant_ to use that connection to then short out one of the very delicate connective wires that Peter had weaved into their necks. Essentially, it was meant to cause a minor explosion in the head of each individual drone and effectively decapitate them.

It was meant to do that.

So, when Peter swung into the fray, dropped to his feet, and pressed the button-- he was really hoping that he was gonna see some sparks. He was _really,_ really hoping. But nothing.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he pressed the remote again, harder this time. “Come on, come on, come on.”

The drones were slowly moving towards him as he frantically jammed his thumb into the button two, three, four more times, but still it wasn’t working and Peter had finally found a subsection of engineering that he was well and truly bad at, so he threw the remote over his shoulder and dipped into a fighting stance.

“Alright then,” he muttered to himself. “Old fashioned way.”

A handful of the drones turned to face him specifically while the others continued working their way into the retreating crowd, and soon enough Peter was dodging bullets and throwing punches and, in a truly inspired move, using his webs to swivel the turret on one drone’s shoulder so it shot a second drone in the head.

_“Woohoo!”_ he used that same web to pull the first drone to its knees. “Y’know-- this is actually super cathartic for me in a lot of ways so I should really be thanking you for the opportunity to kick your ass.”

He jumped in the air and swung a leg around to kick at the drone’s head, which technically worked in severing some important connections, but also resulted in a loud clang and a painful jolt up his heel and through his shin.

“ _Shit,_ that hurt,” Peter hopped on one leg for a moment, shaking it off. “Forgot you were made of metal for a second there, Scraps for Brains,” he took the drone’s head and slammed it into the concrete one last time for safety. “I really hope someone is listening on the other end of these things otherwise I’m using up all my good quips for nothing.”

He was also using up all of his energy very quickly, because as it turned out, even knowing the weakest points on a bunch of big fucking robots didn’t make it particularly easy to single-handedly take out a bunch of _big fucking robots_.

But the big metal superhero that would have been kind of the perfect match for these guys was currently dealing with something a little higher than Peter’s pay-grade. Literally. Because he couldn’t fly.

So single-handle it, Peter continued to do.

***

Pepper noticed Justin slip backstage the moment the chaos started, and after having watched the entire spectacle that was Tony’s arrival followed by his immediate entrance into a modern-day dogfight, she knew that she needed to keep eyes on the man.

Accompanied by Natalie, she ran behind the stage and hurried down the steps towards where Justin was mid-argument with a man behind a series of screens.

“... they’re keeping us out of the mainframe--”

“ _Who_ is keeping you out of the mainframe?!” she snapped as she strode across cold concrete to stand in front of them with all the intimidation factor she could muster over the sound of screaming civilians.

“Pepper, Miss Potts, please, just-- Let me handle--”

“Let you handle this?!” she took in Justin’s nervous energy and his pleading hands and used an incredible amount of self-control to keep herself from kicking him in the nuts. “Your drones are attacking! If they get out of this pavilion the whole city could be in danger!”

“You have to understand,” Justin implored. “This isn’t us-- it isn’t _me_ \-- I have no idea why this is happening or who is doing it--”

“They’re _your_ drones, how can you not know who’s controlling them?” Pepper leaned over computer guy’s shoulder to watch as he tried and failed to get back into this supposed mainframe again and again. “You gotta shut this down, Hammer. I swear to God, if you don’t shut this down--”

“I don’t know _how!”_ Justin cut her off. “I’m working on it, but if I’m gonna figure it out, I need you to _shut the fuck up--”_

And in that moment, Pepper was startled in a way she should have been accustomed to by now, because Natalie Rushman cut him off by grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming his cheek into the desk, one arm pulled tight behind his back.

“Holy--”

“I know you’ve had some sort of mysterious benefactor that gave you the idea for these drones,” she hissed in his ear. “Tell me who they are or I’ll snap your fucking chicken neck.”

Justin struggled against her grip but Pepper watched as Natalie just pulled his arm farther behind him and forced a pained sound out of his mouth.

_“Tell me.”_

“Okay-- Okay!” Justin acquiesced. “I don’t know what they call themselves, but they came to me months ago, right after Tony’s hearing, and said they could help me build something to rival Iron Man. They’re the only other ones that would know how to man these things remotely, it has to be them.”

“And where can I find them?” Natalie asked.

“There’s an annex building at Hammer Industries. I’ve been letting them do their business out of there-- Will you let go of me now? _Christ.”_

Natalie immediately pushed away from him and hurried back the way they had come, leaving Pepper in her dust and thinking she probably needed to find a new assistant before her problem-solving instincts kicked back in and she pulled out her phone.

“Yes, hi, I’m going to need the NYPD as soon as possible,” she said as Justin whined about something or other in the background. “And I’m going to need you,” she pointed at the guy still manning the computer. “To tell me exactly what’s going on here.”

***

Tony was in the middle of a firefight with his best friend for the second time in as many months and although his new arc reactor was something else-- like, sincerely, very cool all-around-- he was not enjoying himself.

As he whizzed around dodging missiles and bullets, he could see a line of drones as they fired rocket-launchers towards innocent people, but he could also see-- was that a human person jumping on the back of a weaponized drone?

“Looks like we’ve got backup on the ground,” Rhodey said via their still-connected comms.

“Think he can handle it long enough for me to kick your ass?” Tony asked.

“He’s gonna have to.”

***

Peter wasn’t keeping track of how many drones he dismantled and dismembered, but as he made his way down the steps outside the pavilion and webbed up yet _another_ rocket launcher, he realized it was feeling an awful lot like every time he knocked one down, three more stood back up somewhere else.

He had just left one sparking in the fountain when he spotted something doubly terrifying running straight at him.

_“MJ?!”_

Peter ran in her direction, dodging incoming blasts as he went, until he could get his hands on her, the tenacious, stubborn, unbelievable idiot of a woman.

“What the _fuck_ are you still doing here?!” he picked her up and she wrapped her legs around his waist as he swung them up to a nearby balcony without him even having to tell her to hold on. “I told you to leave! I told-- Christ, Em--”

“Someone needed to check on May,” Michelle said as she dropped back to her own feet, but keeping her hands on his shoulders, not pulling away from where his hands were on her waist. “But someone needed to check on _you too,_ dumbass. Ned and I are dividing and conquering.”

Peter was grateful for his mask for a moment, for the fact that it would be hiding the very specific way he cared about her, written right there all over his stupid, open face. He gripped her waist just a little tighter, took a deep breath to try and ground his feet to the floor.

“I hate it when you pull shit like this,” he said, more calm now, but just as serious.

“I know,” she replied simply. “Now how can I help?”

***

Michelle sprinted down the steps behind the stage, phone pressed to her ear and eyes locked on to one Pepper Potts. Only a few more yards and then she was practically pushing a guy in a rolling computer chair out of the way and leaning over in front of the monitors in his stead.

“You’re…?” Pepper began, but Michelle didn’t have time to explain. She was on a mission for Spider-Man after all.

“Alright, Ned,” she put her phone on speaker and set it aside. “I’m here. Walk me through it.”

“Dope-- Okay-- Shit,” Ned floundered.

“Leeds, you gotta focus,” Michelle snapped. “The Colonel’s suit first so we can get our guy some backup, yeah?”

“Yeah. Yes,” Ned took a deep breath that Michelle understood to mean he was getting in the zone. “So if you wanna take back control, here’s what you need to do…”

Michelle started typing.

***

He watched Natasha get in a car with Happy and drive away, which he knew probably meant she had a fight to handle elsewhere, but he could’ve really used the help on the fight going on _here._

Peter was feeling banged up and bruised and there were multiple tears in the poor suit that he was so tired of sewing back up by hand, but none of that was the worst part of a fight that went on too long.

Not the aches and pains, not the exhaustion, but the fact that here he stood, facing down a weapon of mass destruction, and his web shooters were out of fluid. With a quiet _fuck_ he realized that if he dropped his hands from a fighting stance to replace the cartridge, he would be a sitting duck for any number of attacks from this thing, but he was also nursing at least one bruised rib and a gash in his calf, so his hand-to-hand without the webs wasn’t quite up to par.

He was deciding whether sliding between the drone’s legs and high tailing it out of there until he could replace the fluid cartridge would work, when Iron Man himself zipped down from out of the sky, hovered beside him for a moment, and blasted the whole thing backwards.

“Nice work, kid,” he said, a touch of amusement hitting even with the mechanized voice.

“I had that handled!” Peter shouted and definitely didn’t whine, but Tony was already shooting back up into the open air and certainly didn’t hear Peter’s quiet, “For the record,” as he refilled his web shooters.

***

Tony was trying to lead them away from the Expo, and away from any people in general, but he had yet to figure out how to incapacitate Rhodey’s suit without actually hurting Rhodey in the process.

“Tony, I’m locked on.”

“To what?” Tony zipped under the overhang of a parking garage, swerving and dipping between pillars.

“To _you,”_ Rhodey asserted. He was using the voice of a soldier, but Tony knew this man, and he had personally given him enough scares over the years to be able tell when he was afraid.

And James Rhodes was afraid.

“It’s okay,” Tony assured him. “I’m dodging-- Real good at dodging--” a pillar beside him got pelted with bullets from one of the turrets on Rhodey’s suit.

“Tony!”

“Not a scratch!” he left the garage and went straight up, gaining altitude to take them further away from any potential bystanders. “We got this-- We’re gonna-- Uh-- Figure it out. I’m a genius, right? We’re totally gonna figure this out--”

“Sir,” Jarvis spoke up in his ear. “Incoming call from Miss Potts.”

“Yeah, why not, I’m not really doing anything at the moment,” he snarked before he heard the click of a call being connected. “Pepper-- I know, this is very much probably my fault and I will put my head on a stake for you as soon as--”

“Shut up for a second and listen,” she cut him off. He did as he was told, because just how he could tell when Rhodey was afraid, he could tell when Pepper Potts was about to save his ass. “I’ve got-- Um, it’s a long story but we’ve got people here and we’re working on getting Rhodey control of his suit again.”

“What do you need from us?” Tony asked.

“So, according to a boy named Ned whom I’ve never met before,” Pepper said. “What’s going to happen is the suit is going to go completely offline for about ten seconds.”

“Does Ned-whom-you’ve-never-met-before know that Rhodey is still _inside_ the suit?” Tony whipped around a corner and dodged another slew of bullets.

“Tony, it’s the only way, this is why we’re talking right now,” she said in such a way that he could hear her trying to keep her voice level for his sake, to keep _him_ calm. “You gotta get him someplace where he won’t hit anything, where he’ll be able to safely fall for ten seconds before we can get the suit back online with him in control.”

“You want him to free-fall for ten seconds,” Tony balked.

“Connect James to this call please, Jarvis,” Pepper said authoritatively, clearly not having time to hold his hand any longer. “Rhodes?”

“Pepper?”

“We’re taking your suit offline for ten seconds,” she explained. “Tony’s gonna lead you to a safe position to free fall, and I’m going to give you a countdown. Got it?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Rhodey replied certainly, full of trust.

“Thirty seconds out, Tony,” she said. “Get moving.”

Tony was not on board with this plan, he did not want to go through with this plan, but he had also been dodging bullets for long enough now and still hadn’t come up with any plans of his own. So it was looking like he was going to need to trust Pepper and her new friend Ed.

No matter how much it scared him.

“How’s this altitude looking, Colonel?”

“We should be good,” Rhodey said. And then, wavering slightly, “Tones, you’re gonna catch me if it doesn’t work, right?”

“Five seconds,” Pepper said.

“Always, Platypus,” Tony said.

“Two seconds.”

“Ready?”

“Now!”

And then Rhodey was falling like lead and Tony was chasing after him towards the Earth. Ten seconds felt like an eternity and got them a lot closer to the ground than Tony was personally comfortable with, but then Pepper was telling them _back online!_ and Tony saw the lights in Rhodey’s mask come back on, and his thrusters were pushing down and slowing his fall until he was moving back _up._

Up, up, up, weaponry retreating and hovering beside Tony above the city.

A friend, not a threat.

“Jesus Christ,” Rhodey gasped. “That’ll wake you up.”

Tony, out of something like relief, just laughed.

***

“We did it!” Michelle exclaimed with a bright, surprised laugh. “Did we do it? We did it right?”

“According to the news, Iron Man is no longer being pursued by Colonel Rhodes!” Ned replied from the other end of the line.

“Um-- But, Michelle,” that was May’s voice, which had remained quiet save for offering Ned moral support during the entire process so far. “The two of them are still fighting off a bunch of those robots. As is Spider-Man.”

“Shit, right,” Michelle put her hands back on the keyboard. “You’re not done yet, Leeds. How do we shut this down?”

Pepper Potts was pacing back and forth over Michelle’s shoulder, and the guy who had been working the computer before her was anxiously hovering, having tried to get his hands on the keyboard more than once and making Michelle slap his wrist away each time.

“What it sounds like is that each drone is communicating in its own unique language,” Ned told them.

“Well, can we choose one and focus on that?” Pepper asked, having hung up the phone to let the dual Iron men deal with the situation at hand without her in their ear.

“It’s-- I mean-- Miss Potts, Ma’am,” Ned floundered. “It’s gonna be a bit more complicated than that…?”

“Ned, if we have to do it one by one, we’ll do it one by one,” Michelle told him. “But we have to keep-- Oh, shit--”

She pulled her hands away from the keyboard abruptly because the screen flashed-- blue, then white, then back to the strings of coding commands they’d been looking at before, except now featuring a little video chat window in the corner of the screen.

“Nicely done, Miss Jones,” Pepper Potts’ personal assistant said with a sly smile. “I’ve got it from here.”

Michelle turned over her shoulder to look at Pepper. “She’s on our side, right?”

“I--” Pepper shrugged, as much bafflement on her face as existed in Michelle’s chest. “Yes?”

Ned was asking frantic questions on the end of one phone and Natalie the maybe-not-an-assistant was typing away at the end of another, and Michelle just watched it all happen.

Because she had been locked in on the task at hand with laser focus, but now she had a beat, and she could start to worry again.

Spider-Man was still fighting, and he wouldn’t stop fighting until it was over.

So Michelle was going to be there right until the end.

***

Tony and Rhodey arrived back at the site of the Expo just as Peter, sitting atop the shoulders of one of the drones, pulled its head off and threw it over his shoulder.

“Nice of you to join the party!” he called out as the two of them joined the fight.

“Nice of you to keep it going for us!” Tony replied as he zipped past Peter, dropped to the ground and shot two drones with one blast of his repulsor.

Peter frowned. _“Hey.”_

He didn’t have time to chase after him with a witty comeback of his own, and instead had to fall back into the ongoing fray, but he promised himself he’d bite back later and that gave him another burst of energy.

Well, that and the two extra bodies on his team that hadn’t been there before. Really, they were a lot more suited to this kind of fight with the guns and the blasts and the little tracking missiles, not that Peter would necessarily admit that out loud, but he was definitely grateful to not be playing as a one man band anymore.

Peter was using the dismembered arm of one drone to knock another around when it ended, so it took him a few extra whacks before he realized that it wasn’t fighting back anymore.

That none of them were fighting back anymore.

His heart was pumping fast and his breath was panting faster, and he looked around rapidly to make sure that what he thought was happening was actually happening. The remaining drones had all powered down, returning to their resting stances with weapons retracted and feet planted.

Tony and Rhodey returned to the ground before flipping open their masks. Peter dropped the drone arm he was still holding, and then immediately sat down on the concrete, slumped with one leg out straight and one tucked underneath him.

“Is it just me or was that a little anticlimactic?” he asked, feeling the curious gazes of his new superhero pals raking over him.

“Yeah,” Tony said, hint of genuine surprise to his tone. “Feel like we missed a big part of what happened here.”

Peter thought about Natasha hopping into a car with Happy earlier in the night.

“I’m sure we’ll hear about it later,” he said, resisting the urge to lay down flat on his back.

It was quiet then, at the edge of the main pavilion, as Peter and Tony both caught their breath and Rhodey jetted off to make sure everything was in order with the police-- considering neither of the other two were on great terms with law enforcement in general.

And then, as his brain caught up to the moment, Peter’s head shot back up. “Wait-- Should you-- Mister Stark, should you be here? Is your heart okay?”

Peter pushed himself back to his feet and stepped closer to Tony, ducking his head and studying the reactor in his chest.

“Why does it look different?” he asked as Tony watched him with a shifting expression on his face that Peter both did not notice and would not have understood if he had. “Are you trying a new prototype? What’s the core on this one like?”

It took a full ramble before Peter realized Tony wasn’t responding, so when he looked up to see the man smirking at him, he was utterly confused.

“What?”

“I fixed it,” he said. “New element.”

“No way,” Peter laughed brightly. “Oh my God? Like, new element as in you _discovered_ a new element? That’s the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, your pal Michelle helped me out after you went on sabbatical,” Tony replied, smug as he cocked his head to the side and put his hands on his hips.

Everything going on inside of Peter’s head halted where it stood, where _he_ stood, there in front of a man who was too smart for the good of any of them.

“What-- I don’t--”

“Don’t play dumb, Parker,” Tony cut off his floundering. “I know you’re under there.”

And really what was the point in contradicting him when he would just keep fighting for an admittance and when Peter knew himself well enough to know he’d break eventually.

“She told you?” he asked, sheepish and nervous, but also a little put off.

“She didn’t,” Tony said. “I just figured it out because I’m just as much a genius as you are a dumbass.”

Peter pulled off his mask so he could scowl at Tony with his full face.

“Uh-uh, Boy Wonder,” Tony shook his head. “You don’t get to be the one that’s mad in this scenario,” he motioned between the two of them with the wave of a hand.

“What? Yes I do. Of course I do.”

“You, Peter Parker, have been lying to me for _months,”_ Tony insisted. “I think I’m allowed to be a little perturbed.”

Peter laughed. “I lie to everyone all the time!” he said. “I lied to my aunt for almost a full year before she found out, and I like lying to my aunt a whole lot less than I like lying to you.”

“I’m not done, I have more bones to pick with you,” Tony pointed an accusatory finger at him and Peter rolled his eyes.

“Can’t wait.”

“You left SI and immediately started working on this bullshit?” he motioned around the empty pavilion and the abandoned drones.

“My family was being threatened!” Peter exclaimed with fierce indignation. “I didn’t have a choice!”

“Your family gets threatened, you ask someone for fucking help about it!” Tony fought back.

“What, from you?” Peter lifted an eyebrow. “After you fired me?”

“I fired you, I didn’t _banish_ you,” now Tony was the one rolling his eyes.

“I mean, in all fairness to me,” Peter said. “You were pretty mean about it.”

“I was going through something,” Tony fired back. “You can’t hold that against me.”

“Okay, well I’m _sorry_ for trying to keep you from _dying--”_

“I’m sorry, _dying?!”_

And that was Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts herself, frozen in her tracks for a moment where she had been coming up behind them before storming towards Tony with renewed vigor.

“Okay,” Tony put his hands up as he turned to her. “I was going to tell you--”

“You were actually _dying?_ ” she continued with fire in her eyes. Peter took a slow step backwards, away from them and their brewing argument. “You were dying and you didn’t think that was something I should--”

“I was gonna tell you! I was gonna--”

“Tony Stark, do you actually have a brain in your head or is it just a bunch of--”

“I wanted to sit down and make you and omelet and then--”

“I can’t believe you. Selfish, arrogant, son of a--”

“I’m fine now! I’m perfectly okay!” he turned to look at Peter. “Kid, tell her. I fixed it! All better.”

Peter held his mask in both of his hands, thumbs running across the fight-mussed fabric and looked between the two of them with a gaping mouth for a beat.

“Um…” he said. “I don’t know that I should--” he was searching his head for a way out of this particular rock and hard place, when his eyes caught sight of one walking across the pavilion floor with his backpack slung over one shoulder. “MJ? MJ-- Thank God-- Thank fucking--”

He pushed past the other two and a whole slew of shut down drones and practically ran to her, not caring at all if he looked lovesick or desperate (except, yes, caring a little bit that he looked lovesick and desperate). As Pepper and Tony picked up their conversation where they’d left off, Peter flung his arms around Michelle’s shoulders, let his face fall into her hair, and took a deep breath as she returned the hug gently, as if expecting that too tight a squeeze would hurt him.

“You’re a dumbass,” she said quietly before pulling away, her hands patting at his chest and waist awkwardly as though searching for injuries. “I hate your stupid guts.”

“Yeah, mutual,” he laughed drily. “I told you to go to May’s, Em. I told you it wasn’t _safe--”_

“Dude,” she made a face at him. “You are not still angry about that.”

“You can’t just put yourself in danger every time you think I need your help,” he realized his hands were still on her shoulders, squeezing at the fabric of her denim jacket insistently, but he didn’t let go. He really needed her to hear him, see him, be with him.

“You _did_ need my help,” she responded with a tilt of her head and a steadiness to her words. “You do.”

And maybe that shut him up because she was right or maybe he was just too damn exhausted to fight about it, but Peter took a deep breath, and he let it out, and he pulled her in for another hug. Felt her hands on his shoulder blades, felt her breath against his neck.

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said softly.

“You too,” she responded, matching his tone.

When they pulled away, Michelle picked up his backpack from where it had fallen at her feet and hung it back over her shoulders.

“So is this a hospital situation or a May’s medicine cabinet situation?” she asked him, eyes searching so she would be able to tell if he lied to her.

“Medicine cabinet,” he said.

“No bullets?”

“Only grazes.”

“Anything broken? Ribs?”

“Bruised.”

“Okay,” she seemed satisfied with that and turned to begin the journey to the street. “Let’s go then.”

Peter followed easily, because who was he to deny her.

“Hey, Underoos!” Tony called out after them from where he was still standing beside Pepper. “We’re not done talking about this!”

Peter lifted a hand instead of turning around to look at him.

“For tonight we are!” he responded over his shoulder. “See ya later, Mister Stark!”

Michelle took his hand and dragged him towards the street as he slipped back into his mask.

“By the way,” he looked at her. “Did you really help him fix the arc reactor?”

“You gonna be a sore loser about it if I did?” she chuckled.

“I can’t believe I missed it!” Peter whined. “The science nerd stuff is supposed to be my thing! You’re a _film major!”_

Michelle just shrugged glibly. “Oops.”

Peter was still laughing about it when he picked her up and swung them towards home.

***

Still in his suit but with the face plate pulled back, Tony sat on the steps of the pavilion beside Pepper Potts.

She was refusing to leave until she knew the Expo was clear and that everyone was safely on their way home, and so he was refusing to leave without her. There was a tension between them that was always there post-bickering, but it was quieter this time, as Pepper rested her elbows on her knees and properly slouched in front of him for probably the third time in recorded history.

Tony could see the exhaustion in her, knew that it was his fault, and knew that speaking up about it would probably make it worse, but he was itching for her to say anything, do anything, even if it broke his heart.

Eventually, after a longer period of quiet than the two of them had ever shared, she did.

“I don’t know how to handle this,” she told him with a shake of her head but without turning her face to look at him. “I never know if you’re going to run the company into the ground or-- or-- or _kill yourself_ \--”

“Considering the circumstances--”

“Considering the circumstances, you were dying and you didn’t tell me about it!”

That got her to look at him, right in the eye with all the fear and indignation of a woman who had too much on her plate, who had been carrying too much on her shoulders for longer than any person should have to.

“You were dying, Tony,” she continued, quieter now. “And I don’t know how to handle that so I think-- I think I might have to resign. I don’t think I can do this.”

“What?” Tony’s brow, Tony’s entire face furrowed. “Did you just say you’re resigning?”

Pepper cocked her head to the side, made a face as if to question his seriousness.

“I mean-- Okay,” he continued. “That’s. I guess it’s not entirely surprising. I do get it, you know, and you don’t have to-- make any excuses--”

“I’m not making excuses, I’m--”

“Well, you are making excuses--”

“I think I have some completely reasonable complaints here--”

“You do! Totally reasonable,” Tony moved closer to her, insistent and earnest and enraptured by the way her eyes looked up close. “You deserve better,” he shrugged, simple and true.

Pepper’s eyes left his face, falling to where his hand rested on the concrete step between them, and as he watched her place her hand on top of it he desperately wished he wasn’t still wearing the suit.

“You’ve taken such good care of me,” he told her, almost apologetic, maybe entirely so. “I’ve been in a tough spot and-- those kids and the superspies and all that nonsense were helpful, but-- _you’re_ the one that got me through it. So…”

He flipped his hand over, pressing his chunky, metal fingertips against hers, the circle of his repulsor into the soft skin of her palm.

“Thank you,” she said sincerely, in such a way that made his chest tighten, but not in the uncomfortable shrapnel-in-his-heart sort of way. In a familiar way, unique to this woman and the way she made him feel.

“You know,” he said. “We’re gonna have to handle the press because you only had the job for like three hours--”

“Well, with you it’s like dog years,” she frowned at him. “It’s like the fucking presidency, the way it’s aged me.”

And she was funny and she was beautiful and he was the one trying to keep up with her every step of the way and so he put his free hand on her cheek and he pulled her closer and he kissed her in lieu of a response.

And although Tony knew she would correct him about this if he was wrong, he was pretty certain that she was kissing him back. A hand across his jaw, falling to land on his chest, right above the light of his arc reactor, and Pepper Potts was kissing him back.

“Weird?” he asked as he pulled away. “What’s the verdict.”

“Not weird,” she smiled brightly at him.

“Pretty alright, huh?” he grinned right back, laughter on his breath.

And then he kissed her again.

***

“What happened to Hammer?” Peter asked, sitting on the edge of the bathroom sink while Michelle glued shut a laceration on his shoulder with practiced ease.

“Pepper called the cops on him,” she responded.

“There’s no way that guy’s staying in prison very long,” he let out a snort which turned into an audible wince.

“Nope.”

“And Pepper said he was working for someone?”

“Some sort of mystery organization funded this whole mess,” Michelle finished up and nudged him over so she could wash her hands in the sink. “Gave him the idea for the drones and everything because they knew he’d be easy to manipulate into going after Tony since he already had a vendetta.”

“And we still don’t know who the organization was,” Peter sighed as he scooted off the counter and gingerly put on a t-shirt.

“I bet your superspy friend does,” Michelle met his eye in the mirror. She grabbed the hand towel, dried her hands, and turned around to face him head-on. “Pete, if this turns into something big-- if you get wrapped up in it again…”

Peter tugged down on the hem of his shirt, posture immediately softening just because of how she was looking at him. Open and trusting and earnest in ways she reserved for these moments.

“I’ll tell you,” he promised quietly. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”

She pushed off the edge of the sink and, arms still crossed, let her head tip forward to rest against his sternum. Peter placed a bandaged hand at the nape of her neck to gently hold her there and said, one more time to make sure she heard it--

“I promise.”

***

Three days later, Peter was standing in J. Jonah Jameson’s office, being loudly reprimanded for being bad at his job.

“A robot army!” he yelled at Peter’s intentionally slumped form. “A robot army attacks, Iron Man blows a bunch of shit up, and Spider-Man is out there, just causing damage and destruction, and you don’t manage to get _any of it?!”_

“I wasn’t there,” Peter tried to explain. “And they closed off the streets leading to the Expo as soon as it started--”

“I don’t care!” Jameson slammed his hands down on the desk. “You’re our Spider-Man contributor, you get me pictures of Spider-Man!”

Peter glanced at the clock behind Jameson’s head, bouncing on the balls of his feet as it tick, tick, ticked away towards making him very, very late.

“Okay, listen,” he put his hands up pleadingly as he began to back up towards the door slowly. “Just don’t fire me, okay? I’m gonna get you some killer shots this week-- some real menacing shit-- and we’re gonna make up for it! We’re gonna totally make up for it--”

“Parker, don’t walk away from me!”

“I’m so sorry, I’ve gotta go to a meeting,” Peter continued. “It’s really important, but I’m gonna get you those pictures--”

_“Parker!”_

“I’ll be back on Friday, sorry, bye!”

Peter spun on his heel and dashed for the exit. He was still going to be late, but only the usual amount.

***

“The door is unlocked for you, Mister Parker.”

“Thanks, Jay!” Peter said as he ran out of the elevator and down the hall. He was panting loudly by the time he stumbled into Tony’s lab, one of the pockets on his backpack definitely unzipped and having sacrificed a pen somewhere on his trip between the subway and here, but Tony just looked up from his work with a quirk of his eyebrow. “Sorry,” Peter smiled.

“I just assume you’re gonna be twenty minutes late to everything at this point,” Tony shrugged. “You brought it?”

“Yep,” Peter scurried across the room and dropped his backpack onto Tony’s workbench. He had to dig around beneath his textbooks and notebooks to grab the bunched up suit at the bottom, but he pulled it out with a quick tug and let it fall in front of Tony.

“Alright, Spider-Kid,” Tony clapped his hands together-- almost delighted, if Peter had to put a word to it. “Let’s make you a Stark tech suit.”

“You know,” Peter grinned at him. “Parts of my current suit are technically Stark tech.”

Tony shot him a look. “What?”

“I mean, I might’ve-- used some of the materials available to me as an intern?” Peter continued, all faux-sheepishness and real amusement.

“Are you telling me you’ve been stealing from me?” Tony gaped.

“I dunno, maybe that makes it Parker tech, since it was all still my design,” Peter shrugged. “But yes, to answer your question, I did use some stuff from the R&D lab for the eye lenses-- and the web shooters. That’s okay, right?”

Peter beamed, Tony scowled.

“Peter Parker, _I swear I’m gonna--”_

_***_

**_Peter Parker will return in_ **

**_“Nothing but a Neighborhood”_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Prem there are questions that still aren't answered and relationships that haven't gotten where I want them to get yet" Ah, yes, well-- What's that? A coming sequel? Well, yes! If you hadn't already caught sight of the fact that this is the first part in an ongoing series, hey! It's part of a series!
> 
> It probably won't take long to get the first chapter of our next installment out, but I don't have a specific date yet so subscribe to the series if you wanna be notified or follow me on [tumblr](https://premiere-pro.tumblr.com)!
> 
> Thank you so very much for stopping by and hope to see you again soon!
> 
> Love,  
> Prem

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for stopping by <3 i've never posted anything in this genre before and i'm a lil nervous about it, so your comments will definitely be appreciated!
> 
> ps. i'm premiere-pro on tumblr if you wanna come say hi


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